Please don't spend money on this.

An Exercise In Nonsense

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

The title role in True Believer is played by Robert Downey, Jr., who is an eager young law school graduate looking forward to interning with famed civil rights attorney James Woods.Woods who's a throwback to the hippie days of the Sixties is now making a living defending drug dealers and other various and assorted dregs of society. He's an attorney and bills have to be paid. By the way note that his office has his living quarters in it, a practice perfected back in the day by Roy Cohn. Out of the blue comes a mother looking for an attorney for her son who killed an Aryan brother in prison. But she's also looking to re-open the case that got him there in the first place, a Chinese gang killing that he swears up and down he did not do.Woods and Downey go to work and what they uncover is a frightening case of official corruption. It's an object lesson in how law enforcement can if it wants to, manufacture evidence to convict someone if they want them bad enough. In this case it's to cover up the real murderer, but I won't say more.James Woods is just about perfect casting in the role of the aged and jaded defense attorney whose young assistant helps him recapture some of his youthful idealism. Robert Downey, Jr. aids and abets Woods every step of the way in this.But the best three performances in the film by far are Miguel Fernandes as the corrupt and maniacal police snitch, Kurtwood Smith as the District Attorney of New York County and Yuji Okumoto as the imprisoned defendant.Kurtwood Smith came to be known to millions as lovable, irascible Red Foreman in That Seventies Show. Here he's one hard-nosed District Attorney who sanctions all kinds of rule breaking for what he considers the greater good. He's far from TV's Adam Schiff or the real life Robert Morgenthau.True Believer is a nice drama about some people who take on the system and win.

I imagine people seeing this movie when it was initially released in 1989 probably have a different perspective on it.However, I can only review it from today's bias, since I only recently saw it. This may mean I am judging the movie, on its own merits, unfairly.The fact is, I have seen this plot innumerable times on Law and Order and all those similar cop/lawyer shows. It's just not very interesting. We all know what is going to happen. There's no tension. Of course, ordinary plot can be compensated for by strong characters, but here the characters are also pretty one-dimensional. James Woods as Eddie Dodd over-acts, and I don't buy his character's sudden change from defending scuzzy drug-dealers for cash bonuses, to caring once again about the people he defends. There's just no reason given for it. I think we were supposed to get the idea that he sees his former self in the younger and idealistic Roger Baron (Downey), except we don't see any evidence of this transition, we only know this because it's a standard of any movie featuring the older jaded mentor and the young fresh tyro. Downey has very little to do, everything focuses on Dodd's journey. And Dodd is just not a compelling character.

Finding this film after 13 or 14 years makes me a True Believer in Google!Having forgotten both the names of this film, and the lead actor, I have remembered the character portrayals and plot lines for all this time, and have been scouring video stores and film catalogs for years, trying to recall some scrap of identifying info so I could rent it again, or even buy it. On an usually quiet day today, I just happened to stop at a Blockbuster two doors from a public library. When I received the usual "Sorry, can't help you without a title," from the Blockbuster clerk, I came over to the library computer and Advance-Googled "courtroom drama Asian suspect" entering years between 1980 and 1990, and VOILA!!!!! Guess where I'm going when I log off . . . Anyone into the courtroom drama genre should enjoy this film tremendously. After 15 years, I'm finally going to see it again! YAYYYYY!

This was a good, but not great movie. If you like James Woods you will like this movie, if you don't you probably won't. Standard plot: Lawyers try to solve a murder and expose bad guys to save their client. How can you go wrong? Look for "Red" from "That 70's show". Downey & Woods would reunite 3 years later in "Chaplin". 7 1/2 out of 10