High Crimes (2002)
Grade: B-
Cast: Ashley Judd, Morgan Freeman, Jim Caviezel, Adam Scott, Amanda Peet
Director: Carl Franklin
Rated PG-13 for violence, sexual content, and language

“High Crimes” is a classic example of how a film can be involving and very well made but never rise above average quality because it refuses to break away from formula. Other recent examples: “Along Came a Spider”, “Double Jeopardy”. Interesting how the former starred Morgan Freeman and the latter starred Ashley Judd, and this film, better than both of those, pairs them.

If you’re not a regular moviegoer and you only rent every once in a while and very rarely go to the theater, I imagine that you will love “High Crimes”. I, however, am a person who has for years had an intense interest in movies (the boredom of the current film atmosphere is causing my fanaticism to wane, I must admit, but that is not the issue at hand), and I have thus discovered some truly great films…films that are not afraid to defy convention and act as an original, exciting work, rather than something that plays by the rules. “High Crimes” plays by the rules like Tracy Flick of “Election” plays by the rules, only Flick is probably more corrupt. As those kind of films go, ”High Crimes” is as good as it gets, but that doesn’t stop it from being one of those kinds of films. “The Mothman Prophecies”, which came out a couple weeks before “High Crimes”, only makes “Crimes” more depressing because “Prophecies” proves there’s such thing as a great mainstream movie with depth.

The story is very, very familiar, which by itself is about as surprising as the ending twist (more on that later). Claire Kubik (Ashley Judd) is shocked to find out her husband (Jim Caviezel) has been charged with a crime—murder—from his days in the military. He even has a different name from how she knows him. She hires lawyer Charlie Grimes (Morgan Freeman, once again in a film that is a lot less impressive than he), and the film basically keeps endangering Judd, while sandwiching these scenes with scenes of interaction between Judd and Freeman, carefully crafted to showcase their non-romantic chemistry (and there’s a lot of it, enough to persuade me to see “Kiss the Girls”, which is probably one of these kinds of films). The audience is also given full chance to sympathize for Judd, since she doesn’t know if her husband is lying or not. Poor Ashley…what’s a woman to do? Why, what the script says, of course!

I told you I’d come back to the twist ending, and I wasn’t lying. How could I not? Of all the things wrong with this film, the ending is the most wrong. If bad is a form of ugly, the ending of “High Crimes”, is, to make an understatement, successful in making John Merrick look like a model. It’s one of those twists that belong in the “Unbreakable” and “Valentine”-populated Hall of Shame, films with endings made up of a twist so ridiculously pointless, thuddingly inept and inevitable, it almost ruins the rest of the feature. Your average filmgoer may not have been there and done that; I have, and the film will not get a “Whoa” from me just because it ends differently than it initially hints. In fact, this kind of thing has become so popular that I predicted, at about the 20-minute mark, just how it would end, without getting the slightest hint of foreshadowing outside of the accelerating knowledge that the film would not be remarkably genre-defying. Damn, I need a name for this genre of these kinds of films.

Morgan Freeman, perhaps the greatest of many great modern actors who must not read their scripts (okay, so maybe he’s tied with Samuel L. Jackson, currently underwhelming critics with “Formula 51”), has the ability to take command of a cinematic situation, and his acting is about as good as it could be; the rest of the actors promptly follow suit, giving excellent performances. I’ve always been a fan of Ashley Judd, even in crap, and her work here solidifies my opinion of her, while simultaneously solidifying my sadness that every movie she appears in must be, by definition, a B-movie. Caviezel is also good, especially when he gets an emotional scene or two with Judd; if these scenes had better dialogue, they would be appropriate Oscar clips. Finally, in a small role, Amanda Peet (the underrated “The Whole Nine Yards”) once again charmed me, playing Judd’s sister.

This movie contains the following: car crashes; Amanda Peet in underwear; the inexplicable and unexplained disappearance of an important main character before he/she is resurrected for the finale; tearful miscarriages; undeveloped subplots about the messy past of an alcoholic; echoes of “A Few Good Men”; double-crosses and red herrings as frequent as bursts of violence in “Goodfellas”; a finale that feels the need to bring a gun into the mix, even though it already has the out-aged-only-by-Jesus-himself cliché of The Person Who Won’t Die; moments that will have females of low IQs crying “You go girl!” by Judd’s character’s audacity; and a cute final scene that depends on an already established pleasure (I would guarantee that it’s Judd and Freeman’s chemistry, but who says they aren’t dead? Wait, who am I kidding?) Take almost any movie, and I doubt you will find it to be as confused as this one; “High Crimes” is lost as to whether it should be great or mediocre. It settles for the offspring of the two, which isn’t bad…just disappointing.


-Alex, October 2002