peteg's blog - noise - movies - 2024 10 25 TrueCrime

True Crime (1999)

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More minor Clint Eastwood completism. He produced, directed and starred. Also a jag from Risky Business via co-writer Paul Brickman. Perhaps because of these two there is some slick dialogue (OK, one liners) but otherwise the script is crap. This is very annoying as the cast is generally decent and Eastwood's talents for building movies are clearly wasted.

Eastwood puts himself in San Francisco, so recently the land of Dirty Harry, as a soak/pantsman/newspaperman hunted out of NYC due to dodgy reporting and life choices. Go west old man! He has an age-inappropriate wife (Diane Venora, reprising her scorned-wife role from Heat (1995)), a daughter about a tenth of his age (his own, Francesca Fisher-Eastwood) with a hippo fascination and yet still chases the young ladies (specifically Mary McCormack in an early bar scene and Lucy Liu in a coda). Notionally he finds a vector for providing justice to a man (Isaiah Washington) on death row, wrongly convicted, but this is obvious from the start.

Given the premise — the man is getting executed at San Quentin just after midnight — there is a strict order of operations on a timer so every scene without free-agent Eastwood is pure filler. There's a kooky subplot involving Catholic priest Michael McKean that goes nowhere. The resolution of the murder mystery is too neat and unsatisfying. The most fun is watching boss James Wood (and others, but mostly Wood) taking it to Eastwood. Denis Leary is too flat as a very dour cuckold.

Roger Ebert somehow found three stars. Janet Maslin. Both declare it an effective thriller, perhaps because they were also working in print.