David Dobkin’s The Judge is the kind of safe, familiar Hollywood drama that arrives at this time of year with a decent amount of hype and one eye on an Oscar campaign that never really materialises. However, with Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duvall leading proceedings, this straightforward courtroom-thriller-come-family-drama is a lot more entertaining than it perhaps has any right to be.
Downey gives good Downey as Hank Palmer, a slick but morally questionable attorney who makes a good living defending those he knows to be guilty. In the middle of a case, Hank receives the call that his mother has died and he has to return to the home town he left 20 years ago to attend her funeral, which reignites the strained relationship he has with his father Joseph (Duvall), the straight-laced small town judge who doesn’t approve of Hank’s career choices.
Within a couple of days, the fractious relationship between father and son reaches boiling point, but Hank’s plans to head back to the city are interrupted when Joseph is charged with the hit-and-run murder of a man he sent to prison 20 years ago. With his father facing serious prison time, Hank has to stick around to defend him and inevitably they begin to repair their damaged relationship while working together on the case.
While the film leans far too heavily on the same clichés we’ve seen in numerous films about the prodigal city-slicker son returning to his humble roots, the showy performances from Downey and Duvall at the centre of the film paper over a lot of the cracks. In a rare non-Tony Stark role, Downey puts his usual fast-talking schtick to good use with Duvall’s stoic, stubborn patriarch providing the perfect foil. Watching the two go at it provides the film’s best scenes, particularly a shouty showdown in the middle of a conveniently timed hurricane.
The courtroom drama is similarly well-played, with Downey going toe-to-toe with Billy Bob Thornton’s sharp-suited prosecutor in a series of well-staged, sub-Grisham scenes of simplified legal back-and-forth.
The problems arise with the sub-plots and tertiary characters that clog up the film, leading to a bloated 141 minute running time that could’ve easily been trimmed down. Caught between Hank and Joseph are loveable yet damaged siblings Glen (Vincent D’Onofrio) and Dale (Jeremy Strong), a former baseball prodigy whose career was ruined by injury and a video camera fanatic with an unspecified mental illness. These characters only purpose is to pile on some emotional resonance to the family drama and wring a few tears from the audience, particularly Dale and his gratuitously poignant home movies.
Most egregious of all is a pointless aside involving an old high school girlfriend (Vera Farmiga) that becomes baffling and a little bit icky when it emerges that Hank has had a drunken fumble with a woman who may or may not be his own college-age daughter (Leighton Meester). Farmiga does her best but her part feels like an afterthought, like writers Nick Schenk and Bill Dubuque were required to include a female character.
With a tighter script and fewer forays into mawkishness, The Judge could’ve really capitalised on the star power at its core. Downey and Duvall are superb and the film is solidly put together by Dobkin in his first stab at a drama but its lack of focus and the subsequent overlong run time undermines the main narrative and lessens the emotional resonance.
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