David Dobkin’s hopelessly maudlin and glacially paced drama The Judge is one part John Grisham thriller and one part James L. Brooks melodrama, two great tastes that taste absolutely abysmal together. The Judge the kind of movie you want to reach out and strangle.
The cheesy daddy issues and uncomfortable comic relief gags about incest and mentally-challenged siblings just don’t jibe with the otherwise deadly serious storyline about a hot shot lawyer (Robert Downey Jr.) forced to defend his bullheaded father (Robert Duvall), himself a small town judge, on a vehicular manslaughter charge… especially when it may turn out to be premeditated murder. It’s one thing to use a dramatic high concept as the backdrop for a story about a family reconnecting – heck, Luc Besson does it all the time – but The Judge makes the a-plot so severe that all the cheesy homespun small town b-plot feels insultingly out of place.
While there’s a dead body on the slab and a family member who may be guilty of homicide, Dobkin’s film spends most of its 141-minute running time on rehashed Doc Hollywood small town nostalgia, a regurgitated romance with Downey’s high school sweetheart (Vera Farmiga, who has shockingly little chemistry with her co-star), interminable sequences of family movie nights and a “why didn’t you love me” argument in which Duvall walks out into a hurricane just in case you didn’t get that this is all important and stuff.
Even when The Judge does try to pull out the stops and treat the murder mystery like a real plot point, it collapses under the cartoonish noise of a sword unsheathing that accompanies the collapsable coffee cup menacingly unleashed by the criminal prosecutor (Billy Bob Thornton). That’s one evil coffee cup. Shit is clearly about to go down, coffee-style no less. And yet said shit never actually goes anywhere; the big legal climax explains nothing about the mystery and focuses instead on an emotional outburst from Downey so prolonged and so pointless that the only way Dobkin can think to explain why the prosecutor isn’t objecting all over the place is to simply never cut to him ever again. Who cares that someone died? What really matters is whether our hero loves his dad or not.
With a stellar cast like this you might imagine that The Judge could get by on sheer charisma, but this film proves that even the wry wit and effortless charm of Robert Downey Jr. can be undone by a movie that doesn’t know what’s funny, and doesn’t know what makes you feel anything. The editing is so languid that the timing on practically every joke is off, and the emotional beats are so broadly telegraphed and executed that by the second half of the film, the “serious” parts are the only parts worth laughing at.
The Judge tries so hard to be earnest that you just can’t take it seriously. It would have been more honest to superimpose the words “For Your Consideration” at the bottom of every frame. It’s a cheap shot movie, full of seemingly important plot points and characters so bloated and extreme that even a child could tell they were being emotionally manipulated and reject it outright. The Judge deserves to be held in contempt. It’s one of the worst movies of the year.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
