Country:
USA
Recognizable Faces:
Christian Slater
Kevin Bacon
Gary Oldman
William H. Macy
Mia Kirshner
Directed By:
Marc Rocco
Picture this. A bloodied Kevin Bacon, with long and dirty hair, a neglected beard, his arm stretched in a cross, mumbling and getting beaten like the Christ on the Via Dolorosa. A sight striking enough to make me ask myself: "What the fuck am I watching?". Murder In The First is my first special request review, that has been made to me by Twitter. Fortunately, it's not as bad as its opening moments, where Kevin Bacon goes biblical on the viewers. In fact, it's not bad at all. It's not great either, but it's a decent product of Hollywood culture. It's by no means a masterpiece, but it's an honest swing at the nature of justice in a war-torn America. And apparently a true story also.
Henry Young (Bacon) has been transferred to Alcatraz due to an administrative technicality, despite that he stole five dollars to feed his starving sister for only crime. Since he stole it from a post office, it's a federal offense. After trying to evade, he is snitched upon by his co-conspirator Rufus McCain (David Sterling) and thrown to the hole. For three years. When the Warden (Stefan Gierasch) finally discovers him, he is put back into the population and immediately murders McCain with a spoon (yes, a goddamn spoon!). Henry seems headed for the gas chamber, but a *sigh* young and idealist layer on his first case, James Stamhill (Slater) wants to change the murder accusations into involuntary manslaughter, claiming that the treatment he received in Alcatraz, by the evil-assistant warden Glenn (Gary Oldman) turned him into a savage assassin.
Murder In The First establishes justice as a very vague, porous concept established by men. The application and the understanding of law, in a troubled America, differs from character to character. It's somewhat nihilistic to think that you can't really have law, wherever you have an interest to protect. Gary Oldman being the best example of this, as the fucked-up prison official Milton Glenn. He lives up to the saying that the worst shithead is always the shithead with kids. Glenn constantly blames his shortcomings on that fact that "he has a family to feed" so that he's "not the bad guy". His interpretation is a little theatrical, but he's by far the best. He seems to be the one who understood the most what the movie was about.
That's what there is to Murder In The First though. You have Oldman on top, then everything goes downhill from there. William H. Macy is good but a bit straight, Kevin Bacon is all right, but way too theatrical, Christian Slater is impossibly bad and the judge...let's not talk about the judge. I don't think that the actors are all that to blame though. They play the cards they are dealt the best they can, with that weird script. If that movie would have been shot in 1945, I wouldn't have minded the over-dramatic acting and that good vs evil played out format. But it's not. I blame the director Marc Rocco and the writer Dan Gordon for the shortcomings of Murder In The First. They seem to have insisted on showing the suffering of Henry Young more than actually building a story around the suffering of Henry Young. It's a common mistake all writers do. This one just happened to have been filmed by Hollywood. Watch it for the amazing performance of Gary Oldman, for the keen outlook on justice and because you have nothing else to do. It's decent, at best. It's trying too hard to change things, so it doesn't change anything at all.
SCORE: 70%
