Just Cause Blu-ray delivers great video and audio, but overall it's a mediocre Blu-ray release
A brutal murder is committed in the Florida Everglades. Eight years later, a principled Harvard law professor tries to save the convicted man on Death Row who swears he's innocent of that crime. For the small-town detective who investigated the killing, however, there's no question he caught the right man.
Just Cause is a fountain of wasted opportunities. Start with the talented cast, anchored by Sean
Connery (Sean Connery!) and including such usually reliable stalwarts as Laurence Fishburne,
Blair Underwood and a bevy of fine character actors filling out the small parts, which is usually
the sign of a first-class project: Ruby Dee, Lynne Thigpen, Ned Beatty, Daniel J. Travanti, Kevin
McCarthy, Hope Lange (her last film) and Ed Harris, who plays a memorable psychopath.
(Scarlett Johannson, all of ten at the time, played Connery's daughter.) Then there's the ripely
atmospheric Florida locale, which includes the swamps of Collier County, where you can almost
feel the heat and humidity; Connery's character, a Harvard law professor, looks appropriately out
of place there, which is just how he's supposed to feel. Then you have the weighty moral issues
raised by the death penalty, which, by the end of the film, turn out to be no more than a pretext
for another psycho-killer tale hanging on improbabilites each one slimmer than the last.
The director of this misfire was Arne Glimcher, a big-time art dealer who dabbled in producing
and directing feature films for about ten years at the end of the last century; his best achievement
as a producer was Gorillas in the Mist and as a director was the little-seen Mambo Kings. But
Glimcher shouldn't take all the blame, because Just Cause is a largely faithful adaptation of the
novel of the same name by John Katzenbach, son of a former U.S. Attorney General and author
of the novel Hart's War, which became the film of the same name. The screenwriters, Jeb Stuart
(The Fugitive) and Peter Stone (Charade), should have known better than to leave some of
Katzenbach's more far-fetched gimmicks intact. He may have been able to get away with them
on the page, but on the screen they're so wildly improbable that the suspension of disbelief
collapses with a thud. For the sake of first-time viewers, this review will be spoiler-free, with one
exception for which I'll give advance notice, but you have been warned.
In 1986, in Ochopee, Florida, a young college-educated black man named Bobby Earl Ferguson
(Underwood) is arrested over the protest of his grandmother, Evangeline (Ruby Dee), for the
gruesome rape and murder of an eleven-year-old white girl, Joanie Shriver (Barbara Jean Kane,
in flashbacks). Bobby Earl is held for 22 hours, during which he's beaten and brutalized by a
vicious police detective, T.J. Wilcox (Christopher Murray). Then the local sheriff, Tanny Brown
(Fishburne), enters the room, empties all but one chamber of a pistol, which he aims at Bobby
Earl's head and plays Russian roulette until the suspect confesses to the rape and murder.
Eight years later, with Bobby Earl on death row, Grandma Evangeline hand delivers his letter
seeking help to Paul Armstrong, a professor at Harvard Law School and a noted critic of the
death penalty. Armstrong hasn't tried a case in twenty-five years, but his wife, Laurie (Kate
Capshaw), a former prosecutor from Dade County, Florida (that's Florida, same state as Bobby
Earl's case—got it?), urges her husband to try his hand back out in the real world.
When Armstrong arrives in Florida, his in-laws (McCarthy and Lange) are glad to see him, but
no one in Ochopee is. The wounds of Joanie Shriver's loss are still fresh, as Armstrong discovers
when he interviews the teacher (Thipgen) who saw her get into a car resembling Bobby Earl's,
the doctor (Brooke Alderson) who performed the autopsy, and the defense attorney, McNair
(Beatty), who took the case pro bono. "I lost half of my business from defending that
son-of-a-bitch", says McNair, ruefully. "And he got the chair. You have any idea what my life
would be like if I had gotten him acquitted?" (Exchanges like these, between actors of the caliber
of Beatty and Connery, are the best part of Just Cause.)
Armstrong also meets with Sheriff Brown and Det. Wilcox, who all but threaten violence (and, in
Brown's case, a little more). He has no doubt that Bobby Earl's confession was coerced, but he
also can't find any evidence of innocence. Then Bobby Earl points Armstrong in the direction of
another death row inmate, serial murderer Blair Sullivan (Ed Harris). Sullivan is a manipulative,
Bible-quoting megalomaniac, but he gives Armstrong cryptic clues that lead him and Tanny
Brown to the knife that killed Joanie Shriver, something that had eluded numerous intensive
searches. At long last, Armstrong has a basis to reopen Bobby Earl's case.
From here, Just Cause proceeds down an increasingly ridiculous path filled with progressively
less convincing reveals. Having been initially presented to us as not only principled but
intelligent and worldly, Armstrong becomes an idiot who's blind to obvious red flags that even
Bobby Earl's original defense lawyer, McNair, wouldn't have missed. In Katzenbach's novel, the
character was a journalist; changing him to a law professor was presumably necessary to tailor
the role for Connery's age, gravitas and accent (Armstrong emigrated from Scotland), in which
case the only way to explain the character's ineptitude would be as a result of Ivory Tower
inexperience and the blindness that comes with an academic's vanity. But that's not how
Connery plays the role, perhaps because the filmmakers didn't think the audience would
sympathize with a hero who's an overt fool.
I promised advance notice; so skip this paragraph if you don't want to know about one of Just
Cause's "reveals" that doesn't, in fact, reveal much except the film's contempt for plausibility.
Midway through the film, Armstrong goes looking for Tanny Brown at his home, where he
discovers from family photographs that Joanie Shriver was the best friend of Brown's daughter
and virtually a member of the family. The sheriff should have disqualified himself from the
investigation, and this discovery is treated as a shocking and startling revelation. And yet this is a
small town, where everyone knows everyone else. The point is made repeatedly. Why has no one
mentioned this before, not even Bobby Earl's lawyer, McNair, who went to such lengths to show
Armstrong what an effort he'd made at trial? Why didn't Bobby Earl mention it to Armstrong,
because he certainly must have known? Why wasn't it part of the trial record, where the
prosecution might have used it to establish motive, given the history of animosity between the
sheriff and Bobby Earl? "Reveals" based on facts that should be in plain sight, including one notable fact
relating to . . . let's call it "health", are the flimsy foundation on which Just Cause builds its
entire story, and it collapses long before the structure is complete.
Whatever issues one may have with the film, there are no significant problems with Warner's
1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, which shows off the anamorphic Panavision photography of
Hungarian cinematographer Lajos Koltai (Malèna). Florida is often depicted in pastels, but the
Florida of Just Cause appears in deep, velvety earth tones that accentuate the atmosphere of
intense humidity and long-simmering emotions, most of them dangerous. By contrast, the prison
that holds Sullivan and Bobby Lee is depicted in cold and unnatural colors (especially the orange
jump suits), and the lighting is harsh and artificial. Whatever the environment, the image is finely
detailed, with a visible but minute and natural grain structure throughout, and the black levels are
well-maintained, which is essential for the critical night scenes in the film's third act. No
sharpness appears to have been added artificially, and there's no indication that any detail has
been stripped by filtering. The absence of any features, while unfortunate from a consumer's
point of view, ensures that the 102-minute film fits easily onto a BD-25.
The most noticeable surround activity on Just Cause's DTS-HD MA 5.1 occurs during its swamp
sequences, where the listening room comes alive with the slightly ominous sounds of nature
(mostly birds, but other wildlife as well) coming from unseen points all around. Another scene,
not in the swamp, uses the buzzing of flies to similar effect. The closest thing the film has to an
action sequence is an automobile pursuit near the end, which registers a few solid impacts with
deep bass extension; the same feature accompanies several "jump" effects and slamming doors
that ring soundly through the viewing room. Overall, though, the mix for Just Cause is a
restrained affair that supports the dialogue-driven story. The dialogue itself is always clear, which
is no small achievement when Ed Harris's Blair Sullivan character begins bellowing at top
volume. The score by the ever-busy James Newton Howard is well presented.
I have no objection when pulpy thrillers enter serious territory. When such efforts are done well,
they demonstrate that the filmmakers have higher aspirations and the result can transcend the
limits of genre. The prime example is The Silence of the Lambs, in which the hunt for a serial
killer assumed mythic proportions, because it became the essence of a young FBI agent's
spiritual journey. Other films have exceeded their roots by giving serious consideration to the
cost exacted from the officials tasked with investigating such crimes; notable examples include
Tightrope, Manhunter, Helen Mirren's Prime Suspect series and Copycat. But when a serious
issue like the death penalty is used as nothing more than decor for a routine murder mystery, and
then the murder mystery isn't even well executed, it's an offense against the seriousness of the
issue and an insult to the craftsmanship of film. Either one alone would be objectionable. The
combination, for profit, is despicable. Just Cause can be enjoyed during the scenes of Connery's
Armstrong investigating, but be prepared to have the whole affair turn sour near the end. My
suggestion is to rent.
This summer, Warner Home Entertainment will continue transferring its library catalog onto the HD format. The studio will release Blu-rays for sixteen popular thrillers, including The Butterfly Effect, Coma, Hard to Kill, Next of Kin, Outland, and the Blu-ray ...
