The Whole Truth (2016)

(On TV, August 2022) I was looking forward to The Whole Truth because of its eclectic casting. You wouldn’t necessarily expect a throwback to the Grisham-inspired courtroom dramas of the 1990s to feature Keanu Reeves as a slick defence attorney, or Renee Zelwegger as a grieving widow, or Jim Belushi as the murder victim (in flashbacks) or Gugu Mbatha-Raw as an eager co-counsel. But wait: The casting gets increasingly inexplainable as the film steadily gets more ludicrous—what could possess all of those actors to take on such weak material? But don’t fret—you get an hour’s worth of unremarkable but not yet silly material to tolerate before it all goes to waste. What’s obvious early on is that, even as a Grisham-lite legal thriller, The Whole Truth is weak stuff: the film is visually unremarkable, Reeves can’t pull off the gravitas required of the role, and the entire murder case doesn’t feel particularly compelling. Much is made of the lead attorney’s excellence, even if it becomes increasingly obvious that much of the cast of character seems to exist in small social circles. Mbatha-Raw has some good material early on as a truth detector, but she gets increasingly sidelined (then evacuated) for no good reason. But the film keeps the worse for the end, as the resolution of the murder case hinges on a terrifying case of conflict of interest that only makes sense in thrillers eager to value shock over plausibility. Except that there isn’t much shock to get either—it just feels like another arbitrary decision in a film crammed with them. Director Courtney Hunt doesn’t bring much to the convoluted script, and all of this explains why The Whole Truth has sunk into obscurity even despite its cast. Unearthing it in 2022 only confirms how much it deserves to be forgotten.