True Believer

True Believer
By Peter John Gardner

After watching this film, I now fully understand why studios and directors almost always hire attractive people to play the protagonists in the movies. When you've a main character that looks like a skinned poodle, it's hard to follow the film because the viewer either has a hard time watching the absurd looking lead or they cannot take their eyes off the train wreck of costume design.

This is the first Robert Downey Jr. movie that I've watched where he's not the one with the most ridiculous haircut. That coveted prize would go to the main lead Eddie Dodd played by James Woods. Mr. Dodd used to be a hot shit civil rights lawyer back in the sixties who has turned into a defense lawyer mainly for drug dealers because they pay him well. In private, Dodd still reminisces about the sixties which is once AGAIN soundtracked by Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower".

Oddly enough, it's Downey that plays the straight man in this movie rather than the weirdo sidekick. Fresh out of law school, Roger Baron (Downey) is hired by Dodd to be his clerk. Roger is crushed to find out that his idol now works to set cocaine dealers free instead of the vague civil rights stuff that he used to do which the movie never really explains.

One night, a plot device comes into Dodd's office. It's an Asian woman and her daughter pleading with Dodd to help her son who she feels has been wrongly imprisoned for 8 years after allegedly stabbing the guy. Why she waited 8 years to fight the case, we do not know. Dodd initially refuses because that's not his "specialty" and shows the women to the door, but after smoking a joint and listening to Jimi, he decides to take the case. What follows is a paint-by-numbers crime/courtroom drama that would be an episode of Law and Order if it weren't for the presence of Woods, Downey, and a few recognizable "Hey! It's that guy!" faces.

I enjoy courtroom dramas as much as the next guy, but as I stated earlier, this one was hard to watch. Not because of the subject matter, but because of James Woods's hair. Never before has a character's haircut bothered me so much that I have trouble following the movie. Throughout the entire film, Eddie Dodd has a neo-Def Leppard style mullet. It's unusually curly and tied back in a ponytail. It looks like a small poodle died on top of his head. At first, I thought that his character was meant to look shitty because he's been out of his game for a while, and he'd cut it once the plot got going but no. For an hour and 45 minutes, you have to watch James Woods with this wig that, with a little more white, could pass for a Revolutionary War recreation actor's wig. During the final courtroom sequence, I really wanted James Woods to untie the ponytail, wave the freed mullet around in the air, and sneer to the bad guy, "Justice has been SERVED".

What I learned from this movie pretty much boils down to haircuts. If I have a bad haircut, people won't take me seriously and wouldn't want to follow my adventures in life. If I have a good haircut, then people would just to take it for granted because everyone should have a good haircut, and I'd have to find something else to differentiate myself from the rest of the pack.