Review: Dependable Freeman steals the show in ‘High Crimes’

Geoff Carter

Friday, April 5, 2002 | 10:12 a.m.

High Crimes

Grade: **

Starring: Ashley Judd, Morgan Freeman, James Caviezel, Adam Scott and Amanda Peet.

Screenplay: Yuri Zeltser and Cary Bickley.

Director: Carl Franklin.

Rated: PG-13 for violence, sexual content and language.

Running time: 115 minutes.

Movie times: http://www.vegas.com/movies/

"High Crimes" is a middling, unremarkable thriller made solid by its performances. I can watch Morgan Freeman in anything, and he can act in anything, even the movies that collapse under him. In this film he plays a loose-cannon lawyer and recovering drunk, and while the film under him holds up, you can't help but breathe easier when he shows up on screen.

Art Buchwald once wrote a column about his wife's behavior during the Apollo missions, saying she trusted Walter Cronkite more than NASA; Freeman is like that. He's Mission Control, flying even mediocre films such as "High Crimes" in for safe landings.

But it's not his movie. Ashley Judd plays Claire Kubik, rising young trial lawyer and the wife of Tom Kubik (James Caviezel). One night, as they finish Christmas shopping, Tom is arrested by the FBI -- and in the space of 24 hours, Claire finds out that her husband fabricated his past, his name, even his character.

The real Tom -- Chapman, war criminal, pleased to meetcha -- is put into a Marine base brig and brought before a military court. Claire assumes control of his legal team -- a young lieutenant, Embry (Adam Scott) and "wild card" lawyer Charles Grimes (Freeman). Grimes lives in a hovel, wears leather jackets and smiles more than any Freeman character has in recent years.

"Military law is to law as military music is to music, Mrs. Kubik. Wake up and smell the napalm," he says upon their first meeting. Freeman remains jovial, and even a bit goofy, after things begin to get heavy, which they do in short order.

For one thing, someone keeps roughing up the team -- slapping around Claire and her flaky sister (Amanda Peet), pummeling Grimes outside a bar and later, in one of the films most harrowing sequences, dousing Claire's car with motor oil. Chapman's old commanding officer (Juan Carlos Hernandez) seems the most likely suspect, but there's also a shadowy figure, as there is in every film that has too many plot threads to tie up.

"High Crimes" owes everything to the father-daughter chemisty between Freeman and Judd. When it's absent, the film diminishes in scale; it all but becomes television. The real crime of "High Crimes" is that the film pretends not to know that it's delivering something less than its actors promise with their performances.