Paul Armstrong (Sean Connery) is a university lecturer who has made his name for his opposition to capital punishment.
This background leads him to becoming involved in the case of a young black man, Bobby Earl Ferguson (Blair Underwood), who is facing the death penalty for the death of a young white girl.
As he begins his investigation, Armstrong finds himself locking horns with the officer who arrested Bobby Earl, Tanny Brown (Laurence Fishburne).
Released in 1995, Just Cause is basically flotsam in the wake of Silence of the Lambs. With an all-star cast, on the tin it looks like a classy thriller with a smidge of social conscience about the prison industrial complex.
I caught this movie on Netflix, and based on the above qualities, I thought I was in for a solid but maybe predictable thriller.
But then the movie keeps going.
This movie is a grab bag of plot twists which render it completely pointless - there is a particular character reveal halfway through the movie which should completely change the central character’s involvement in the case - but it only serves as the set up to the hammiest of third act turns.
The southern locations are merely set dressing. In fact everything in this movie is set dressing.
The cast are fine - aside from Ed Harris, who goes WAY too big as an imprisoned serial killer who might hold a clue to the truth. The only person who seems genuinely engaged is Laurence Fishburne, but even he is brought down by this sinkhole of a script.
This movie falls into a subgenera of movies that equate outrageous plot twists with drama. But what works about a major plot twist is that it completely changes the character and viewer’s understanding of what is going on. Here, the story never feels like it is moving in any particular direction. And when things do happen, you do not really care because none of it really matters.
Just Cause feels like it is teasing better movies: police brutality, white saviours who cannot follow through with their politics, even the thorny dynamic of having the (potential) real antagonist be a black officer. This movie does not care to delve into anything - the only idea it has is to redo the final twist of Jagged Edge.
By the third act, the movie starts to feel like thriller mad libs. Or a really shitty improv show where the joke is that they have to use all the thriller cliches.
The movie does not even look that interesting - there is an aggressive banality to the way this movie is shot and edited that dissipates whatever atmosphere the story is building. In that respect, it is not that different to most of the original product Netflix releases.
According to IMDb, this movie was the result of a power movie by agent Mike Ovitz - his client Arne Gilmchear, an art dealer-turned-filmmaker, wanted to make a movie and Ovitz packaged Just Cause for him, complete with a star, his client Sean Connery. Apparently this was sold to the studio without Connery’s knowledge.
I’m not sure how that worked out, but this movie does feel like a contractual obligation.
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