Stuffed with downer endings and sucker punchlines, The Judge is the Game
of Thrones of courtroom dramas and dysfunctional family dramas!
It is easy to see why The Judge was
stuck in development for more than a few years; it begins with
several cookie cutter genre tropes and then subverts them in grand
style. Robert Downey Jr plays the city slicker who is forced into a
return to his hometown—but do not expect him to find his heart grow
a few sizes larger even as he reconnects, however ineptly with his
roots. Robert Duvall plays the grumpy old patriarch of a somewhat
dysfunctional family where the “evil lawyer” is the most
successful son—but the family drama is played for bitter comedy
rather than the broad laughs evoked by the prestige actor scenery
chewing of August Osage County. It is also a potboiler courtroom
drama with riveting confrontations, multiple reveals, and unexpected
confessions—yet there is a studied refusal to evoke, affirm, or
even appeal to high principles of justice or morality.
Hugely ambitious, the script takes on
all these major, often lazily-written tropes and unravels them
methodically. It’s like watching Game of Thrones as a reader of the
source novels: you know the rug is being pulled from under your feet
but you can’t help but be amazed at how the trick is performed.
On paper, it looks very difficult to
work and it shouldn’t really work, but the film coasts through
easily thanks to screen heavyweights Robert Downey Jr and Robert
Duvall. Perfectly cast for their mutually antagonistic and unlikeable
roles, the two principal actors deliver a screen presence and pungent
screen chemistry that ensures The Judge is not quite a breezy dramedy
or a tragicomedy (for want of catharsis or cheap laughs), but a bitter comedy the darkest shade of midnight.
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