Just Cause (1995)

The Worst Film Ever

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Exactly what is supposed to be our take away from this film? Ten minutes in we are privy to two police officers beating and torturing a prisoner in order to coerce a confession. The man is sentenced to death after a joke of a trial with little to no evidence. A Harvard professor is begged by the prisoner's desperate grandmother to appeal the case. The professor takes it on, gets the man freed ... only for him to turn out to be a psychopath and a murderer because he was castrated while imprisoned overnight for another crime he didn't commit.So the guy ends up being guilty ... so it was supposed to be OK that the police beat a confession out of him? Or that he wound up on death row with little to no evidence to put him there? We're supposed to side with the cops who beat the guy up? Or the system that caused him to be castrated and become a psychopath in the first place?I mean seriously what are we supposed to gather from this film? Whose side are we supposed to be on? Is this film supposed to be anti-death-penalty or for it because it can't seem to make up its mind. And to all the people reading this review and saying "it's just a movie, you're taking it too seriously" I'm sorry but there are thousands of railroaded people in prison right now, likely several innocent people currently on death row. It seems to me a movie like this only muddies the issue or tries to make light of a serious problem within our justice system. In either case I find it profoundly disturbing.

Sean Connery, Kate Capshaw, Blair Underwood, Ruby Dee, Ed Harris, and Laurence Fishburne star in "Just Cause," a film from 1995.Connery plays a professor, Paul Armstrong, who lectures at Harvard against capital punishment. As he's leaving the auditorium, he's approached by an elderly woman (Ruby Dee) who hands him a note from her grandson, Bobby Earl (Blair Underwood). Bobby is sitting on Death Row in Florida for the kidnap, rape, and horrific murder of an 11-year-old girl, Joanie Shriver, in 1986. He didn't do it, his confession was coerced, and they want Armstrong to take the case.Armstrong refuses, saying that he has been out of the courtroom for 25 years. However, his wife (Capshaw), an attorney herself, reads the letter and convinces him to take the case.When Armstrong and his family arrive in Ochope, Florida, he learns some disturbing things. The officers beat Earl to a pulp, even putting a gun in his mouth and playing Russian roulette in order to get him to confess. Bobby is found guilty at trial, thanks to his confession and a slipshod defense. Now he's on death row.Bobby is young, good-looking, and well-educated black man, and it's easy for Paul to see why he was disliked in this one-horse town. Bobby believes that another inmate, Blair Sullivan (Harris) might know something about the murders.I really enjoyed this film, but I will agree with other people on this board that it fell apart at the end. The motive given was really weak, making the rest of it seem contrived.However, it's very well-acted, particularly by Fisbourne as the police officer and Ed Harris in a very flashy role as Blair Sullivan. It's a dream part for a good actor.The beautiful Florida that gives the movie an incredible atmosphere - those low-hanging trees, the swamps, the alligators, the silence, the isolation makes one feel impending danger. So innocent and unspoiled, like the murdered 11- year-old who was murdered there.Highly recommended. It's derivative but given the performances and setting, that's okay.

After to read the comments here my first reflection is how hard is to make good movies like this in America, where people have troubles understanding The Simpons plots...but after to read the Dr Jacques COULARDEAU comment from the nice France Im clear the problem is global....In this good movie you can see very clear how bad is work from the prejudice, even if is a liberal one...and how easy is to build prejudices from the safe academy...and how long in the way from theory and reality when is about people, evilness and society...sadly the good intention is ruined in the last part, probably because the director remembered his target audience...the moral of this tale:the best option for filmmakers is to look for a new job...

Slightly above average film that has too many controversial social and political statements to address and does so with a shallow and thin script. As a thriller it succeeds and as a complex contemplative concept it does not.Although somewhat predictable, the twists and turns have you watching just to see if they can convince the audience to accept the gullibility of it all. Heavy handed, guilt ridden and clichéd it moves along at an even pace not ever becoming fully engaging except after we meet a very disturbing psycho-killer (an unforgettable Ed Harris).Not a bad film, it is just trying to be too much and delivers some really unremarkable remedies to tie it all together and it ends up making the movie more confusing and less satisfying than it had to be.A modicum of a script rewrite, eliminating some of the weakness to interject intellectual insights and complex motivations might have made this much more satisfying as a down and dirty ditty of good vs evil. That's a cause, escapism, that can be justified.