True Believer
|
List Price: Our Price: $5.50 You Save: $9.49 (63%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $2.90 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of True Believer
Movie Review: True but easy
Summary: 5 Stars
One more film about the corruption that is killing the NYPD and the District Attorney in that area. Then it is all a question of details. Gritty details. When you are working on a big business like the Colombian connection, you need informers and of course these have a price and that price is simple, total and absolute protection and impunity in their everyday criminal life. In this very particular case there seemed to be some kind of family business that made the informer nervous and he had to kill some kind of boyfriend of his daughter or something and then cover up his crime by having the police arrest and have an other man accused, as long as he was not a Caucasian nor someone from his own band or gang and that's how a Korean was dragged into prison and stayed there eight years. But the film is nothing so far. The point is how the defense attorney is going to get the truth out and his client out of the can. He has to force a couple of people into saying what has to be said and then he can trap the district attorney into revealing that the Korean was just the price to pay for the information about the Colombian connection. A pay off. Then the film is finished and we can go home and rest on our beds with no fear. The most rotten police force and prosecuting branch of justice are watching over us and assessing who they are going to drag down into their nets to pay off some criminal for the little information he has provided them with about some cosmic scandal or surrealistic plot. That's when we regret not to be able to hitchhike our way out of this galaxy to go under another sun on another planet to sun our bones in peace and security. But that is certainly not in our beautiful cities. Enjoy the film, the stunts are great though the stuntmen are a little bit passive.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines
Movie Review: Surprizingly very good film
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a surprisingly very good film. James Woods plays a pig-tailed, civil-rights, badly dressed, very eloquent, and very jaded lawyer who smokes marijuana and is prone to over-statements. A very young looking Robert Downey Jr. - it is 1989 - works as his admiring associate. They are approached by the mother of an Asian man who has spent eight years in prison for murder. She wants Wood to defend him for the recent murder in prison of a right-wing thug who tried to kill him. We see the event and it is clearly self defense. Downey persuades Woods to take the case, even though Woods hasn't handled a murder case in ten years. He spent the ten years defending drug dealers. Woods looks into the history of the Asian man and decides to file to reopen the eight-year old case. He finds a statement in the file that helps him get the case reopened. There was a witness who claimed that he saw the murder and it was committed by a non-Asian. Woods succeeds in getting the new trial, but faces several problems: this witness is clearly crazy, the prosecution has a witness who swears that she saw his client commit the murder, and forensics prove that the killing was done with the Asian's gun.
Woods is threatened by a man who beats him up and tells him to drop the case. Why? The DA offers his client a much smaller sentence. Why? When Woods' client rejects the offer, the DA decides to try the case himself. Why? Woods finds a witness, but the witness is killed. Why? The trial drama is very interesting, but the DA is able to present a better case. But then Downey sees something and everything turns one hundred and eighty degrees.
Movie Review: A must for all James Woods junkies!
Summary: 5 Stars
As a lawyer who has been both prosecutor and public defender, I have to say this is my favorite movie about lawyers and my favorite James Woods performance. I get goosebumps every time I hear his speech about ..."the only good fight is one you win!", said with the passion and spite that only James Woods has perfected. His comment on plea bargaining, that "..this isn't ... Yale, he [the client] doesn't care if we go down but go down nobly. He's looking at 40 years of hard time, and he bet it all on me!" James Woods looks good with a pony tail, and the opening scene where his new intern, played by Robert Downey, Jr., mistakes him for the cocaine dealer is hilarious. So is the scene where Downey tells Woods he is quitting because he is "tired of using exalted legal principles to get off guilty little pricks". (I bet Downey was glad for those exalted legal principles in his own case.) I have to disagree with the comment that this movie realistically portrays the "insidious relationship between police, district attorneys and their snitches". I wholeheartedly doubt that the frame at the heart of this movie is routine anywhere in the United States. But the movie does say something meaningful about the tragedy that happens when good people with good motives go too far. I knew this movie was a touchstone when someone used Downey's line on me during a job interview where I was seeking to hire an assistant district attorney. He didn't get the job, but I haven't forgotten him-and you won't forget this movie.Movie Review: One of My Favorites Ever!
Summary: 5 Stars
Keeping this short..."True Believer" is a film that my husband and I watch at least twice a year, and never get tired of! It's a superb combination of murder mystery, courtroom drama, and redemption story. Clever, quick-moving, superbly acted (with a dazzling performance from James Woods at the center), and full of delicious witty surprises, like the wonderful character of "Cecil (He likes it pronounced See-Sill) Skell", the much-needed witness who can re-open an old murder case, but who resides in a mental institution, and is convinced that the Telephone Company killed President Kennedy. A wonderful movie!Movie Review: Contrived but excellent
Summary: 5 Stars
James Woods is a top-notch lawyer, a former civil-rights watchdog now getting rich businessmen off on cocaine charges.
Then one day a Korean woman walks into his office and asks him to free her son, an innocent man who has spent 8 years in prison for a murder he did not commit.
Does he take the case?
You tell me.
It's all pretty boilerplate stuff, but Woods, Robert Downey, Jr and Kurtwood Smith elevate this tale, based on a true story, to art.