Louisiana defense lawyer Lawson Russell (Cuba Gooding Jr.) deliberately causes a mistrial in the trial of Thurman Parks III (Eric Stoltz). He gets disbarred and wants to write a book better than John Grisham. After 13 months in the Florida Keys, he has done a lot of drinking as a fishing tour guide. He's hired by a strange old man named Marlow. Marlow dies and Lawson keeps his manuscript. Lawson claims the book as his own and it becomes a best seller. Thurman is acquitted. Police detective Clifford Dubose (Tom Berenger) is investigating the real murders of five lawyers that is exactly as written in the book. He hires his old colleague Elizabeth Pope as his defense lawyer.I really like the premise. Cuba doesn't necessarily play the everyman character. He's too brash and could be seen as bringing this on himself. Nevertheless, there is a hard-boiled sense to this mystery except for Marlow and the other false identities. The makeup jobs look bad. They look like Halloween costumes and make the movie look cheesy. Eric Stoltz sounds awful in a southern accent. I don't know if the accent is accurate. Hollywood kid Stoltz is not the guy to do the accent. The movie needs to bring on a better makeup artist and somebody else to take on Stoltz's character.

Narration in movies can be tricky. Sometimes they're practically a requirement, especially if the plot is convoluted or the prose style ornate, as in Raymond Chandler's work. How could we survive without Philip Marlowe's voice-over telling us that "her hair was the color of gold in old paintings"? Just as often, narrations are a crutch, as they are here, telling us things that an Old Master like Hitchcock would have used imagination and skill to tell us visually. Not only is this narrative sometimes pointless but it varies in tone, as if coming from different characters instead of just Cuba Gooding Jr.'s fugitive lawyer. "There's an old saying: Money talks. The only thing it ever said to me was good-bye." Not bad. (Echoes of Philip Marlowe there.) But then again it sounds sometimes pompous. "Quite simply, the book was perfect." No kidding? What happens in this murder mystery, quite simply put, is that Cuba Gooding Jr. is a disbarred lawyer who is framed for multiple killings of other lawyers. He's pretty bitter about his disbarment, after all. And he IS guilty of something. He comes into possession of a smashing murder novel written by a recent acquaintance, a wheezing old man with no family. When he's told that the old fellow has died of a heart attack, Gooding quite simply appropriates the manuscript, copies it, adds his name as author, and destroys the original. That's known as "plagiarism." The novel turns out to be an exact description of five genuine murders, right down to details that only the police and the killer himself could have known. The story, and Gooding's suppose authorship, attracts police attention. The pursuit is on.Well, Gooding's narrative may sometimes become a little precious but at bottom, quite simply put, he's pretty dumb, even for an attorney. The decrepit old man, who looks suspiciously made-up from the beginning, calls himself Christopher Marlowe. Gooding doesn't even blink, and I suppose there are people named Christopher Marlowe wandering innocently around, even if they aren't Shakespeare's contemporaries. But when a lone detective tells him about the dilapidated dude's death and calls himself Goethe, maybe a red flag should have gone up.The location shooting, around New Orleans, is nice but judging from this film it's inhabited largely by people who can't act well. Tom Berenger has a relatively small role as a real detective and does as well as he can with it. Eric Stoltz, never a human dynamo, probably gives the best performance in the movie as a decadent Southern aristocrat. Gooding himself, who was fine in "Jerry McGuire" is an embarrassment here. His most notable achievement is sprinting down a New Orleans street with two cop cars in pursuit. No one else distinguishes himself or herself, though Marianne Jean-Baptiste carries her weight as a friendly and principled lawyer, and Mark Pellegrino is creepy enough to pass as a professor, never mind a serial killer. He has a face that resonates with Crispin Glover's, for what it's worth, and it's probably worth a lot to an informed movie freak.The direction, quite simply, can be described as "pedestrian." We see a scene of passion on the staircase. A man sweeps a half-naked woman up in his arms and carries her up to her room. How many times have you seen a dissolve into the camera following a trail of discarded garments slowly up to the woman's bed? Don't fib, now. But, actually, there's a surprise at the end of this shot -- because there is nobody in the bed! A cut gives us a distant shot of the standard movie kind of human coupling: they're both naked, he has her pinned against the wall, and her legs are around his hips. I'm not sure anyone really DOES something as uncomfortable as that but it's become a movie convention, like the thumbs up/ thumbs down gesture in Roman amphitheaters, which the Romans never did.Well, why go on? The sad thing is that it's kind of a neat idea -- framing a despised lawyer this way, even if you do drag in Faust. Simply put, though, it's too bad it wasn't better done.

The director certainly wasn't the reason why I gave this movie a try, because I must say that I've never heard of the man before. Still, that doesn't mean he can't make a good movie of course. Many famous directors once started their careers when their name was still unknown, so why wouldn't this man be able to make an excellent movie? And I'm already used to watch movies that don't seem to appeal to a great audience for different reasons, so in the end I went for it and hoped for the best...After Lawson Russell gets disbarred as a lawyer for not defending one of his clients the way he should - he knows the man is guilty and his conscience forbids him to keep the man out of jail - he will write a book about his experiences. But the work doesn't progress at all, he doesn't even get started. With his publisher on his back, he doesn't really know what to do. And that's when he meets an old man for the first time. They get along well and when the man asks Russell to read the manuscript of a book that he has been writing, Russell is blown away by it. He is completely struck by the genius of the story and wishes he had written it himself. When he wants to return it, he finds out that the man has just died and then he comes up with an idea that will change his life: he will have the book published under his own name and will not tell anybody that he isn't the original author. The book is an instant best-seller, but than all good fortune turns against him. He gets arrested for the true life murders of the five lawyers in his book and has to try to prove that he is innocent, which is almost impossible because he has burned all evidence of what he did...As a story this certainly isn't awful. Although I can't really see it as an original or strong movie, it is enjoyable and entertaining enough to spend 1.5 hours on it. I guess in the end it is Cuba Gooding Jr. who really makes it worth watching. It's nice to finally see him in a leading role and he gets away with it pretty well. But it also has to be said that he can never make you forget about the weak plot twists in the movie. In the end this movie has too many weaknesses and looks too much like the average courtroom thriller, but even though this isn't the best thriller ever, I know worse ways of spending my time. I'm certainly not saying that it is a masterpiece, but in my opinion it still deserves a rating of 6.5/10.

If you like shouting at the screen because the characters do so many stupid things, this movie is for you. Or....you might enjoy it while extremely intoxicated, so you won't notice that all the characters are one dimensional. I picked this movie up as an impulse purchase, hoping for a good double feature with Double Jeopardy. Well, this turned out to be a B movie, the second of a typical double feature, where the second movie is the one where you ignore the screen and make out with your lover. There are far too many problems with the story that could have been fixed by pretty much anyone who watches mysteries. I agree with previous critics that found holes in the script, and so don't have to elaborate here. Just wanted to vote 'awful' to bring the average rating down so no one will buy this like I did. Even at $4 from the discount bin, this movie wasn't worth it. I haven't hunted for other works by this writer and director, but I now shall so I don't accidentally pick up any of their other 'masterpieces'.