Review: The Judge
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
City Paper grade: D
Robert Downey Jr. plays a slick big-city lawyer who returns to his small Indiana hometown for the first time in 25 years in The Judge, and it feels like he brought the film back in time with him. Part Grisham-lite courtroom drama, part dysfunctional family treacle, David Dobkin’s film is an early-’90s throwback told with all the nuance and subtlety you’d expect from the director of Fred Claus and Shanghai Knights. Back home for his mother’s funeral, Downey is forced to reconnect with his estranged father (Robert Duvall), a local judge who’s arrested for a hit-and-run. Downey falls back on his smarmy but passionate shtick, Duvall does his patented blend of folksy and stern, and the two play tug-of-war with the scenery in their teeth. Dobkin is almost audacious in his bad decisions, never trying for an honest moment when a manipulative cliché will do. When things threaten to get dark, he brings in a cute little girl; when he needs to amp up the domestic drama, he slathers it in a gratuitous tornado. And when the material isn’t shameless it’s shameful, as when using the family’s mentally handicapped youngest brother for comic relief. There’s a single scene, when father and son are forced to confront the old man’s failing body, when something resembling real emotion manages to creep in, but it disappears again behind a cloud of awkward dialogue and Bon Iver songs by the time both plots come to a head in the courtroom.
