Robert Downey Jr. brings some snark to his role in The Judge, while Robert Duvall lights up the screen with his bravado.
Sometimes you can add all the right ingredients, but if the base you’re working with isn’t properly blended, you can’t make it work. That’s the case with The Judge, where all the star power helps to make the film enjoyable but doesn’t erase the abounding clichés in the uneven courtroom drama. And despite revolving around a trial, the flick is really more about the personal interactions of the players outside the crucible of justice and how those relations season the unbiased proceedings. John Grisham-lite or Nicholas Sparks with some gravity might be the best way to describe The Judge. The film’s a bit of a genre switch too for director David Dobkin as he cut his directorial teeth with screwball comedic fare like Wedding Crashers and The Change Up.
By construct, The Judge is rife with conflict and paradox that come in the form of well-worn archetypes like past versus present, country versus city, and the father railing against the son who just won’t see things his way. The film’s most beatific blessing however, beyond the gorgeous bucolic setting (Shelbourne Falls, Mass. subbing in for small town Indiana), is the casting of Robert Downey Jr. as Hank Palmer, a slick Chicago attorney who does nothing but win and has a wife with abs and a derrière you could bounce quarters off. But, as we shortly find out, Mrs. Palmer (Sarah Lancaster) has been bored and wandered with one of her fellow gym rats, something Hank is unceremoniously informed of. All this news comes at the same time Hank learns that his mother has died after a long battle with cancer. Clearly Hank is detached from the family out in the heartland, and for us, the viewer, he gets a few automatic demerits for not being there with mom at the end — his quick reprieve lies in his fatherly compassion towards his seven-year-old daughter Lauren (Emma Tremblay). Continue reading
For What it's Worth 