The Gingerbread Man: Rating: stars

A Southern lawyer (Kenneth Branagh) gets in too deep with a sexy client (Embeth Davidz) and her nutty father (Robert Duvall).

The Gingerbread Man (1998)
1998 · R · Thriller
Reviewed June 5, 2009

As a general rule, most legal thrillers don't need to be made. The plot, with only minor variations, is always the same: flawed lawyer (the flaw can be drink, womanizing, general cockiness, but there's always a flaw) falls for beautiful client and gets in over his head, usually finding out at the end that the beautiful client was setting him up all along. If you've seen Body Heat, you've seen them all, and they're never as well-done as that film.

What befuddles me about this film is not why it was made — as long as John Grisham keeps turning out fast-paced legal thrillers, they will surely be made into movies — but why it required such an overqualified team to make it. I mean, directed by Robert Altman? Starring Kenneth Branagh, Robert Downey Jr., and Robert Duvall? In a film that looks and sounds like it's destined for straight-to-video and late-night hell? I can see how the sheer star power got this project greenlighted, but the final product is so bland that it takes the reputations of everyone involved down a star or two. It's not bad bad, just… boring bad. Which is the worst kind of bad to sit through, as it turns out.

Apparently this movie isn't even based on one of Grisham's published works, but on a discarded manuscript. I can see why it was discarded. As I said, most legal thrillers turn out to be ripoffs of Body Heat, and this is no excecption. Yeah, I'm spoiling the plot by mentioning this, but come on — anyone who doesn't see the ending coming at least an hour away just needs to get out and see more films. Everything about this film is tolerable, nothing more: tolerable shots, tolerable script, tolerable accents, tolerable acting. Nothing is done incompetently or with inspiration; nothing sucks, nothing rocks. The characters are uninteresting, the plot twists clichéd, the ending half-hearted and tired. It's a film that just is, without anything special to recommend it.

There seems to be no reason why the lawyer is obsessed with his client and willing to do so much for her; she's pretty, but the characters just aren't deep enough to explain the attraction. Or maybe they had massive chemistry and I just couldn't see it, the way I couldn't see most of the film's action scenes because they were shot in such darkness that I couldn't tell the good guys from the bad. All the major events happen in the dark, which left me squinting at the screen in vain and asking my husband who just got shot and is she naked and are they on a boat now and wait which one is the bad guy, the flailing shadow on the left or the one on the right?

Thanks to the vagaries of my mail delivery and its disarrangement of my Netflix schedule, I am now stuck with this DVD for the entire weekend. Maybe the universe wants me to watch it again, so that I can figure out what's happening in the darker scenes. Or maybe this is karma’s revenge for my dislike of Citizen Kane, and the universe is punishing me for my lack of taste. Uncle, universe — I cry uncle!