True Crime (film)
From AwardAnnals
| Film: | True Crime |
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| Director: | Clint Eastwood |
| Genres: | |
| Distributor: | Warner Home Video |
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Reviews
Amazon.com
Not enough people went to see True Crime in theaters. Wasn’t Clint Eastwood too old to be playing a guy whom a variety of glorious women, from the middle-aged Diane Venora and Laila Robins to the young Mary McCormack and Lucy Liu, find attractive? Could the onetime Man with No Name credibly play a brilliant crime reporter, Steve Everett, with an ironic turn of phrase and an incurable habit of screwing up both his personal and professional lives? The respective answers to those questions are: hell no and hell yes. True Crime features one of Eastwood’s best and most entertaining performances—and his work as director is utterly assured.
The story (from Andrew Klavan’s bestselling novel) gives Everett the last-minute assignment of interviewing a condemned man (Isaiah Washington) on the eve of his execution. The prisoner, a born-again Christian and exemplary family man, has everything the reporter lacks except a shot at seeing the next sunrise. Everett sets out to get him that, yet far from making a beeline to the exculpatory evidence that will save the life of his “client,” this very tarnished hero has to spend a lot of the next 24 hours contending with the baggage he’s accumulated through drinking, wenching, and familial neglect. (A Pirandellian note: Everett’s daughter is played by Eastwood’s own daughter, Francesca Fisher-Eastwood, and her mother, Frances Fisher, returns for a feisty cameo as a prosecutor.)
This is a good one that got away. Don’t let it happen again. —Richard T. Jameson
Related works
True Crime: The Novel
In the heat of the city, a man is out of time: speeding in a beat-up Ford Tempo, blasting easy-listening music. Reporter Steve Everett drinks too much, makes love to his boss’s wife, and has just stumbled upon a shocking truth: a convicted killer is about to be executed for a crime he didn’t commit.
In the cold confines of Death Row, Frank Beachum is also out of time. Ready to say good-bye to the wife and child he loves and hello to the God he still believes in, Beachum knows he did not kill a convenience store clerk six years ago. But in a few hours—if Steve Everett can’t find the evidence to stop it—a needle is going to pierce Frank Beachum’s skin.
The killing machine is primed. The executioner is waiting. And so is the priest. Now the clock is ticking down and the race is on—between the reporter and his demons, between the system and its lethal flaws, between the last innocent man and society’s ultimate crime…
