If Stephen Hopkin's Under Suspicion were a meal I was served at a restaurant, I would throw it against the wall, flip the table, walk promptly back to the kitchen and knock the chef out cold. It's a hollow, pointless piece, like digging into a pie that's put before you only to find that under that layer of crust there's no filling, only air. The premise is promising: wealthy businessman Gene Hackman who has political ties is grilled out of the blue by longtime friend and police detective Morgan Freeman and his partner Thomas Jane, regarding the murder of a thirteen year ago old girl in the slums of San Juan. Hackman is a successful, assured alpha socialite, and these type of men always have some type of close guarded secret which comes to light. Freeman is a dogged working man who probes him until it almost seems personal rather than routine. Sounds terrific, right? You would think. The acting is of course fine, as these guys couldn't miss a beat if they tried, but the way the story is set up just rips the viewer off blind. These two thespians soar spectacularly, but their duel is structured around purposefully unreliable flashbacks, beating around the bush and oodles of red herrings that treat the audience like sixth graders watching a low rent magician at a birthday party. Hackman has a pretty trophy wife (Monica Belluci, underused) and a host of personal demons that he projects onto Freeman's simple blue collar rhetoric like a defence mechanism. None of these narrative fireworks can save it though, especially when an ending rolls around that is the very definition of a letdown, through and through. In an attempt to explore the forces that drive a man to the edge of admitting guilt whether he is responsible or not, the filmmakers miss the boat on providing a focused treatise that takes itself seriously with these potentially fascinating themes, instead settling on an overcooked, ultimately vacant that could have been so much more.

This was a decent movie but i can understand why some people didn't like the ending as it seemed rushed and could have been better. However, this movie is interesting in the way it depicts the demons of the average man. A successful old man who is married to a woman he clearly doesn't deserve and thinks he is entitled to the world. She knows he is a pedophile and therefore doesn't want him to touch her so they have an estranged marriage, while he goes about looking for prostitutes which are the only women who won't reveal his abusive nature and that he actually likes little girls. He thinks it's OK because they are prostitutes and so he can pretend that they are not real girls. When becoming a suspect of such gruesome murders and rapes of little girls he is clearly sickened by it at first, but as we dig deeper his real thoughts come out and we discover that this rich, intelligent, subtle man could easily be the monster that he is being accused of being. The idea of raping and murdering children is not so far-fetched when we know what he has been doing, and we become aware of the fine line between going to prostitutes, where a man can relieve his gruesome nature and get away with it, and actually killing and raping. The only problem is the ending when his wife actually seemed to have felt remorse because she thought he was guilty. Makes no sense after his atrocious behaviour, cheating and attraction to 13 year old girls, she should have run the other way. Overall it was a nice film worth the time, good acting (apart for Thomas Jane).

to everything else already said about this film - which I gave a 7 out of 10 rating due to the outstanding performances by Hackman, Freeman and Bellucci (who here transcended her fairly squarely decorative role in ways I haven't witnessed her managing to do in any of her other roles, sorry to say, so far - !), despite detesting the directing (which I suspect was exacerbated by bad editing, to boot…) - I wish to add what I notice seems to be missing from almost all other reviews (pro & IMDb); the very real problem of reducing a person down by the process of police (or any official or organised) interrogation which can indeed result in a person credibly confessing to crimes NOT committed; not to make the claim that most of the inmates of the incarceration system confessed to crimes not committed, but high-profile, high pressure crimes can really become a sort of psychological pressure-cooker, perhaps in collaboration with a media circus, reducing wrong results - and thereby not only 'breaking' an otherwise OK or perhaps even decent & upright person caught in the wrong place @ the wrong time, but permitting the actual perpetrator to get away with an unspeakable &/or awful crime. Ironically, serial killers & sociopaths KNOW that, and so manipulating others in ways which will most likely result in this sort of thing IS their thing! (I recall there was a famous case of precisely this in England with a serial killer who started during the war, when getting away with murder was relatively easy, then through a series of elaborate manipulations, resuming his murdering while cunningly framing another for it afterward.) By way of a more simple example; a friend of mine's mother was once questioned by the FBI on the basis of a matter carried out by someone with her exact same name, which mistake revealed itself during the course of their conversation and so was corrected - but she said that by the end of the interview/interrogation, she herself was questioning whether she really was the person she and her family & friends knew herself to be, or the one they THOUGHT she was! Which is hilarious on the one hand, on the other hand it shows how when convinced persons in authority assert something with sufficient confidence, their conviction can be so compelling as to have unintended consequences.Obviously this movie revolves around the relationship of a very flawed couple caught up in a painful & toxic marriage, and a detective who is motivated by his own largely unspoken post-divorce demons, in addition to his genuine outrage over the crimes committed and concern for the public and other potential victims (justified, as he's unable to prevent a third crime - and as a direct result, could be argued, of taking up SO much time trying to pin the first two on the guy under suspicion and in his custody during the time of the 3rd crime…), and being - as already pointed out - really & truly a play, not a movie, it visits much (mostly murky!) subject-matter much more suited to staging than filming, IMO. But as-said, the acting is outstanding in this and worth watching for that, as well as perhaps this very pertinent and perhaps also primary point - which I really want to make, as I really think it matters. :)

Under Suspicion (2000) is a re-make of a French film Garde à vue (1981) directed by Claude Miller and starring Romy Schneider, Michel Serrault, Lino Ventura and Guy Marchand. It was based on the British novel Brainwash, by John Wainwright. I did not see the French film simply because I can't find it but I've seen Under Suspicion more than once and enjoy it every time even though I know how it ends.As a thriller/mystery/crime investigation, Under Suspicion (2000) teases a viewer and more likely would leave a fan of the pure genre disappointed but as a psychological character study which uses the mystery and serial murders investigation as a device to explore the darkest places of human desires and relationships, it is very good. Besides, watching for almost two hours the duel of wills, intellects, and despairs between noble as always Morgan Freeman and exceptional Gene Hackman is a treat. The director's approach to narrative that allows the viewer to be placed along with Victor (Freeman) inside the flashbacks of Hackman's character, Hector, is interesting, unusual, and fresh, and adds to an uneasy and dark atmosphere of the forbidden and deeply hidden desires and fantasies. As great as they both are, for many years after I saw the film for the first time, it was the striking beauty of then relatively little known to the American viewers, Italian Monica Belucci that I remembered vividly. The film director, Stephen Hopkins wanted to cast Monica Bellucci after watching Malèna (2000) while on an overseas flight. I am glad he did. She did not get lost next to her celebrated partners in the film. I also think that moving the action to San Juan, Puerto Rico during the San Sebastian Street Festival that is celebrated every third week in January was a good idea. The carnival atmosphere of music, vibrant colors, and grotesque masks strikes the dramatic contrast with the harrowing devastating experience the main characters of the movie go through and the place in life they find themselves after the investigation is over. Will they ever forget?