The Lincoln Lawyer

Grade: B-

Redemption, we all want it but very few of us get it. We’ve all have countless instances where we wish we could get that second chance. Sometimes we get that chance and we right what went wrong the first time. Others we simply make a mistake again, and hope to get yet another chance. More often than not we are let down. It’s why we are all so hesitant to offer people redemption, because we have been burned before and nobody wants to be burned again. Of course there are some people we continue to give chances even though there have been no signs of them changing the outcome. We all have at least one person that for whatever reason we can’t deny giving them another opportunity. Whether it’s the out of you league girl who you think one day will date you so you continue to let her walk all over you, or maybe the slick talking cool guy who takes advantage of you then ditches you as soon as something else comes along that you continue to let back into your life when that something else goes away and he wants back in, we all know of one. It helps to reach this point if you have a silver tongue. It helps even more if you are attractive.

Brad Furman’s The Lincoln Lawyer was Matthew McConaughey’s shot at redemption. We all loved McConaughey as David Wooderson the creepy yet charming older guy still chasing after high school girls in Dazed and Confused. Sadly from there on out it was all downhill. As is often the case in Hollywood, once they realize that an actor has draw simply off being in a movie they will try to exploit that draw for all it’s worth. They realized women like seeing McConaughey as the handsome and charming male counterpart in romantic comedies and the rest is history. He tried some other more serious roles but ultimately they too fell flat (go watch We Are Marshall and tell me he isn’t doing a terrible George Bush impersonation that whole movie). By 2011 it seemed like America, myself included, had given up on McConaughey.

Insert then The Lincoln Lawyer. On paper this movie wasn’t anything special. A movie from a C-List director based off a book with a title that couldn’t be more literal. I remember seeing the preview and laughing at how ridiculous it seemed while looking forward to another terrible McConaughey performance. But whoever put this movie together was awfully smart about it. They started with a strong script that meant McConaughey didn’t have to carry the film on his acting prowess alone. They also surrounded him with an incredibly impressive supporting cast to force him to step up his game. I mean he spends half this movie interacting with the likes of Marisa Tomei, William H. Macy, and Bryan Cranston. Without giving too much away, there is literally a scene where the movie trades heavy interaction with Macy for interactions with Cranston, a worthy handoff to say the least. And Ryan Phillippe may not have much range but he is the Rolls Royce of snobby rich boys in movies.

Add that all up and if McConaughey failed here then you can kiss any credibility he may have had left goodbye. Luckily for him and the viewer, McConaughey made good use of his chance at redemption. He owns this film. He goes toe to toe with some of the best actors in Hollywood and comes out looking like he more than belongs. It helps that this role was tailor made for him, but regardless he stepped up.

Now about the actual film. The story starts out simple. McConaughey is a fast talking lawyer named Mick Haller, who you as you may have guessed from the title, works out of his Lincoln town car. He takes on shady clients and is clearly the best at what he does. He’s also not scared to get his hands dirty as we see by him hustling a local biker gang in the beginning of the film. What makes this movie good is that this is all brought on as pulp. This isn’t a movie acting in complete earnestness. It is well aware of how cliché it seems and it does a nice job of owning what it is. In some ways it is to lawyer movies what Machete was trying to be for mex-sploitation movies, only it works as an entertaining lawyer movie as well. I talk a lot about how much it annoys me when a movie clearly has a bad script. This was a movie with a good script.

Mick soon finds out that he has been requested to work on the case of the son of a rich real estate tycoon. The son Louis Roulet, played by Ryan Phillippe, is going to trial for assault on a girl he met at a club. Of course he claims he didn’t do it. What happens then is that Mick actually begins to believe his case even though the evidence and to a lesser extent his private investigator played by William H. Macy very much so begs to differ. See as we soon find out, Mick while being a bit of a dirty attorney still has a proper sense of justice. He fears nothing more than not letting an innocent man go. So as Roulet’s story starts to make some sense Mick feels more and more compelled to make sure he gets things right.

The problem is that he ends up doing his job a bit too well and uncovers some things that his client would not like people to know. As it turns out though Roulet was sort of expecting him to discover this information all along, and ends up putting Mick at a serious moral dilemma as his attorney. This all plays out very interestingly in the long court room scenes towards the end of the movie. If that sounded vague it is, and for good reason, as it’s more interesting to see how things play out in this movie than for me to just tell you. You can tell a movie has a good story when people who see it aren’t interested in telling you the story and would rather have you experience it for yourself. Saying “I don’t want to ruin it for you" is a good thing because it implies that there is something to ruin.

The direction of this movie also does a nice job at complimenting the movies strengths and not getting in the way. It’s shot with a lot of shaky cam so if that really bothers you it might be best to stay away, but it helps to give this film a gritty feel that couldn’t be more appropriate. Furman does a nice job of doing just enough so as to not take away from the movies strengths (its script and its acting). The cinematography is also rather solid but again in a minimalistic way. They don’t want you to feel like you are watching a movie. Instead they want you to get caught up in the story and the world they have created in it.

There isn’t much else to say about this movie. It’s a good lawyer/crime thriller that I really wish we would see more movies like. It’s enjoyable because it knows what it is and doesn’t try to be too much. It’s not groundbreaking and won’t win awards, but it operates within its genre superbly. And perhaps most importantly, it reminds us all of why we liked Matthew McConaughey to begin with.