True Crime (1999)

(In French, On TV, August 2019) One of the strongest arguments for the abolition of the death penalty in the United States may be the incessant stream of message movies taking it as a premise to be denounced. The Player laughed about a last-minute stay of execution climax in 1994, but True Crime played it absolutely straight in 1999 (and The Life of David Gale would subvert it in 2003). Other examples abound, but the point still stands: The death penalty can be a cheap tool in the wrong hands, and even the best-intentioned filmmakers can fall in the trap of excessive melodrama. Granted, Clint Eastwood’s film has other problems, and one of his worst ones here is to cast himself in wildly inappropriate roles. Here we have Eastwood directing 69-year-old Eastwood as a two-fisted rogue reporter who regularly steps out of his marriage to have affairs with wildly inappropriate (and much younger) partners. Knowing what we know about Eastwood’s personal behaviour, we have to ask: Wish fulfillment or acting from experience? The problem is that we never believe Eastwood in the role of a clearly much younger (as in: forty-something) protagonist. Even as he goes beyond the expected article to investigate the events leading to an impending execution, we know where this is going. If you manage to set your disbelief aside for a moment, however, True Crime does actually manage to turn into a decent potboiler thriller, with the death penalty as the big consequence everybody runs against. The ending is as predictable as it’s mildly hilarious if you have fresh memories of The Player. With Eastwood’s no-nonsense style, it becomes a serviceable thriller with a few basic script issues, one unforgivable miscasting and an over-the-top conclusion that couldn’t have gone any other way.