Guilty as Sin (1993)
DIRECTOR: Sidney Lumet
CAST: Rebecca De Mornay, Don Johnson, Jack Warden, Stephen Lang
REVIEW:
Guilty as Sin is a slickly, if somewhat shallowly, entertaining courtroom/psychological drama/thriller that serves up plot complications like clockwork, all in moderately engrossing if not particularly surprising or electrifying. It’s not a great courtroom or thriller classic, but it’s an adequate diversion for 107 minutes.
Hotshot Chicago defense attorney Jennifer Haines (Rebecca De Mornay) might finally meet her match when David Greenhill (Don Johnson) slithers into her office one day. He’s a slick, sleazy lady killer who might have taken it a bit too literally by chucking his rich wife out the window…or he might not have. Both repelled and titillated by his oily sexuality, and egotistically intrigued by the challenge of defending such an unlikable shady character, Haines takes up the big case. But she might come to regret it as she becomes slowly ensnared in Greenhill’s games of manipulation, and eventually comes to fear that not only is she helping a murderer walk free, but he might be setting her up to be his next victim.
Guilty as Sin tries to toy for a little while about whether Greenhill is really a murderer or just an “innocent” sleazy manipulative womanizer, but it’s never much of a mystery, and while there’s undeniably a little sexual tension between Haines and Greenhill, we don’t go the route of “tough woman lawyer suddenly forgets all professionalism and falls into bed with her handsome client” a la Glenn Close and Jeff Bridges in the 1985 thriller Jagged Edge (incidentally, Guilty as Sin shares some similarities with that movie, including the ostensibly tough hotshot woman lawyer, her pretty boy client who might be—-and probably is—-a cold-blooded murderer, and her crusty old private investigator friend, played there by Robert Loggia and here by Jack Warden, that feels like almost the same character). It’s tough to say whether Guilty as Sin would have been more or less engrossing if it had given us an affair between Haines and Greenhill and/or built more ambiguity about his guilt or innocence. Actually, Haines already has a boyfriend, played by a poofy-haired, mustached Stephen Lang, but he’s a rather one-dimensional plot complication who’s on standby to be either supportive or jealous as determined by the script. There’s not much “action”; we spend most of the time with the camera lingering lovingly over pretty people in expansive courtrooms and offices and penthouses having passive-aggressive confrontations with each other, but there’s a few interesting twists and turns, especially when SPOILER WARNING Haines resorts to trying to frame her own client before, she suspects, he makes good his eventual intentions of murdering her (the movie doesn’t address how suspicious the supposedly devious and calculating Greenhill thinks it would look if his own lawyer suddenly turns up dead just after he goes through a trial for the death of his wife). Additionally, Larry Cohen’s script has at least one plot hole: late in the movie, Greenhill suddenly produces a lady friend—-seemingly one of the innumerable ones he keeps producing the whole movie—-who provides an alibi by testifying that he was with her at the time of his wife’s death. She’s the respectable society wife of a famous hometown athlete, and insists she wouldn’t jeopardize her marriage and reputation for a lie. The problem is, we know from a flashback that she can’t possibly be telling the truth. So what is her motivation? The script never gives her one. In the end, we finally climax with a big courtroom decision and characters having a tragic accident or two, and a struggle to the death and someone taking a plunge from a balcony. It’s all moderately entertaining but never really terribly surprising or unpredictable, and therefore never particularly exciting. From a director of his stature, the movie has a rather bland, glossy look and there’s nothing really special about Sidney Lumet’s direction except for all the time he spends lingering lovingly over his photogenic stars and Don Johnson’s debonair wardrobe, and that he really wants you to believe it takes place in Chicago (the movie name drops the Four Farthings pub and the Como Inn, and a character reads the Sun Times) although it was filmed entirely on location in Toronto.
Rebecca De Mornay is at her best when projecting a cool intelligence, but at other points doesn’t seem to have a good grasp on her character, with a tendency to be overwrought in more emotional moments and a sometimes stilted, halting line delivery that doesn’t necessarily convince us she’s the hotshot aggressive lawyer the movie tells us she is. On the other hand, Don Johnson feels right at home as the devilishly charming Greenhill, spending the whole movie looking like he stepped straight off the cover of GQ while oozing an oily charisma. Apart from Johnson, who dominates the movie with smug satisfaction, no one else makes much of an impression. Jack Warden is the standard-issue “crusty old detective”, Stephen Lang is the “jealous on cue” boyfriend, and in smaller roles we have the stern-faced Dana Ivey as a no-nonsense judge, Ron White as the prosecutor, and Luis Guzman as a police detective.
Overall, Guilty as Sin feels a bit like a slick, shallow exercise serving up several familiar tropes of courtroom/psychological drama/thrillers in a way that’s moderately diverting but never really exceptional or particularly unpredictable or exciting.
* * 1/2