Country: United States
Genre: Drama/ Suspense/ Mainstream
Director: Joseph Ruben
Year: 1989
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA ESSENTIAL MOVIE
The first thing that has to mentioned when talking about True Believer is the dynamite script by then newcomer Wesley Strick, his best by a long shot. This script has everything: engaging and unique characters, endlessly quotable dialog, clockwork pacing, architectural suspense, and a flawlessly worked out mystery.
And the movie gods smiled down on True Believer — the director is Joseph Ruben, smoking hot after helming his only other great picture, The Stepfather. Ruben doesn’t fumble the gift of Strick’s flawless script. The one action scene has plenty of punch. All of the actors come off well, which only happens when you’ve got a director who knows how to work with actors. Ruben makes NYC a palpable character — True Believer oozes atmosphere. Thanks to Ruben’s expert pacing, the suspense sequences in the third act are almost unbearably tense. This is the second time I’ve seen the movie, and by the end, even though I knew how it was going to turn out, my armpits were wet with sweat.
James Woods was at the tail end of an extraordinary run of great character roles, so it’s no surprise he hits the role of Eddie Dodd out of the park. Who better to play a brilliant lawyer who thinks almost as fast as he talks than Woods? The other standout is Kurtwood Smith, as the cold and pragmatic district attorney that squares off against James Woods’ character, but Robert Downey Jr. is also compelling as the wet-behind-the-ears lawyer Roger Baron, who idolizes Eddie Dodd.
You see, Dodd used to be a maverick, anti-establishment lawyer back in the 60s, famous for challenging assaults on civil liberties, but when Roger Baron arrives at Dodd’s Greenwich village office, what he finds is an ambulance chasing bottom feeder that spends all his time getting drug dealers off on technicalities.
With his rampant idealism, Baron lights a fire under Dodd’s ass and gets him to defend what seems like a hopeless case: Shu Kai Kim (Yuji Okumoto), a Korean kid who has been in jail eight long years for a gang killing in Chinatown, and is looking at another twenty year sentence for killing a member of the Aryan brotherhood in a prison brawl.
True Believer makes me nostalgic for a time when movies didn’t have to either have tons of CGI, special effects and no brains or be shot on video for two nickles in order to be made. There was room for intelligent, reality-based stories with real budgets.
It’s hard for me to convey how good this picture is without spoiling it for you. Just see it. You’ll thank me later.
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