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| Clint
Eastwood, James Woods, Isaiah Washington, Denis Leary |
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Anamorphic
widescreen |
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Dolby Digital
5.1 |
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DTS |
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Trailer(s) |
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Featurette(s) |
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Documentary |
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Audio commentary
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Deleted scenes
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Concept art
/ storyboards |
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Multi-angle
feature |
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Alan
Mann: Stop fucking Bob's wife. He doesn't like it.
An
over-the-hill reporter sets out to prove the innocence of a man about
to be executed within 24 hours.
 Clint
Eastwood can be a brilliant director (The Outlaw Josey Wales, Unforgiven)
but you wouldn't have guessed it from this movie. The plot and story
build-up are so contrived it makes you cringe just thinking about it.
A man who has wrongly been sentenced to death on a murder case is about
to be executed in 12 hours, and as a born-again Christian and exemplary
family man, has accepted his fate. Steve Everett (Eastwood) is a newspaper
journalist who gets the last-minute assignment of interviewing the condemned
man on the eve of his execution. Between sleeping around with half the
town, running his kid to the zoo and pretending he doesn't give a shit
about anything he gets saddled with the job of writing a human interest
angle on the condemned man. Everett, on a serious downslope in his career
and personal life and an ambiguous and generally unpleasant character,
isn't really up to the job but in finding bits and pieces of the case
comes to the conclusion the man is innocent. Everett believes this because
he's learned to follow his nose in search of the truth, the only thing
he has in his life that's worth anything. Up until 50 minutes into the
picture everything's set up to see him fail in this conviction. So far
so good.
But all that gets tossed aside for one of the most insipid Hollywood
movie endings of the past decade: Clint and his nose turn out to be
holier than thou and of course he saves the man from execution at literally
the last second. Believe me, turn the movie off 20 minutes before the
end and you'll be able to say you saw a decent picture. There are some
great scenes between Everett and Alan Mann (James Woods), his boss at
the newspaper. Both don't care much for the floor manager (Denis Leary,
in a thankless role) and especially James Woods' character is joyously
crude. These scenes leave a definite impression and are well acted,
but the ones with Everett, his wife and daughter are pointless to the
extreme and I'm not sure whether these scenes are only meant to expose
him as the bad family man he obviously is or whether they are only meanto
to contrast with the condemned man's family scenes. Either way, you
won't end up caring very much either way. |
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The
Region 1 and Region 2 release are identical.
The
picture is framed at 1.85:1 and is anamorphically enhanced so it fills
your widescreen TV. Colors are natural and sharp, although some of the
darker scenes seem to waver a bit in quality. The Dolby Digital 5.1
sounds good and clear, but since the movie consists mostly of dialogues,
there's not a lot going on to merit much excitement in this department
.
Besides
the standard promotional 'featurette' and the theatrical trailer, this
disc also includes a short documentary called 'True Crime: True Stories'
that goes into the historical facts that formed the slim basis for the
movie's screenplay. It's interesting to hear what really happened though
it has very little to do with what happens in the movie. There is also
an incredibly tacky music video available that was directed by His Clintness.Menus
are static and easy to follow.
Gerard
Castelein
Reviewed: 2001
Click
here for IMDB info on True
Crime .
Click here
to return to the front page.
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