Finally a movie where Harrison Ford’s jizz is a major plot point
Reviews of Presumed Innocent 1990
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Low-key awesome movie with low-key awesome Harrison Ford performance.
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You could watch this, Frantic, and The Fugitive as a trilogy of "Harrison Ford navigates a slick conspiracy to clear his name."
Ford is great as always, at once confident and charming but also vulnerable, hesitant and quietly outraged. John Spencer (RIP) is excellent as the dirtbag detective who helps Ford clear his name. The real MVP is Bonnie Bedelia, who exists on the edges of the film but plays a vitally important role in the proceedings. And to that point, director Alan Pakula uses his mastery of space and staging to help reveal, bit by bit, who knows what about the truth of the matter.
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A classic women=evil legal thriller. Part of a run of movies in the late 80s-early 90s whose main juice came from the idea that if you're a man cheating on his wife, you are DOOMED, not so much by your own choices and actions, but because women are fucking crazy! Harrison Ford rocking the worst hair he's ever had in a movie.
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"I did it."
A catalog of moral compromise, even if it insists on that a bit too explicitly (Raul Julia gravely intoning "Was justice done?" might be pushing it). Also fairly unpleasant that it tries to lump female sexual promiscuity and jealousy in that category (perhaps even positing it as a root cause). nevertheless pretty gripping, especially once you know the outcome, which Pakula constantly teases at just on the edges of the frame with a stray look from someone…
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from IMDB trivia: “Harrison Ford's hair was cut in such a way as to make him look ‘wimpier’ than his previous macho leading man characters.”
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Have you ever seen a film and thought it was being directed by a particular person, only to discover that person is involved in that project in another capacity? The same thing happened to me here, as I thought Pollack or Lumet was in charge, but turned out I was partly right as Pollack is a producer in here. It's a small detail, but I found it amusing. And in many ways, you can recognize Pollack's unique sensibility in the…
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Me halfway through the movie: it’d be hilarious if [Redacted] was the killer, that’d be a hilariously bad ending.
Me when [Redacted] gets revealed as the killer:
😐
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A lot of dialogue about semen
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Paul Winfield's speech as the judge is so funny. It's Billy Madison "may God have mercy on your soul" level scorched earth. Wouldn't be surprised if those guys' wives left them on the way home. Doubt they can still vote. He stopped just short of giving them the death penalty for daring to prosecute an innocent man. I think every trial should end like for one side that no matter the crime.
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Presumed Innoncet. 1990. Directed by Alan J. Pakula.
Somber toned courtroom drama directed by Alan J. Pakula that keeps you in suspense until the last few minutes. A lawyer (Harrison Ford) is investigating the death of a fellow lawyer. In doing so, he finds himself caught in a web of corrupt justice. It has the feel of Hitchcock’s premise of the “wrong person” from the minute it starts. Brian Dennehy, Raul Julia, Greta Scacchi and Bonnie Bedelia round out the…
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Investigating the murder of a fellow lawyer, prosecutor Rusty Sabich (Harrison Ford) finds himself implicated and put on trial after their secret affair is uncovered, in Alan Pakula’s legal thriller co-starring Brian Dennehy, Raul Julia and Greta Scaachi.
Pakula reunited with cinematographer Gordon Willis from his earlier Paranoia Trilogy: while a lot more low-key than those movies, there’s a sense of never quite knowing what (or who) to trust that still shines through here. It’s all set up as a…
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