Movie Reviews : Overheated Woods in ‘True Believer’

“Eddie Dodd,” sneers one of his well-heeled clients in “True Believer” (citywide). “Everyone should own one.” Considering that attorney Dodd has just gotten this scum-sucking cocaine dealer off on a well-deserved drug rap, that’s hardly gratitude.

But flamed-out ex-’60s activist Dodd doesn’t defend New York’s every smack dealer and amphetamine manufacturer for their thank-you notes. The chunky packages of cash they send through the mail will do nicely.

Dodd is another in James Woods’ dizzying catalogue of interchangeable characterizations in which only his hairdos vary. (Unsurprisingly, hipster Dodd wears a curly, graying pony-tail.) The sneer, the intensity, the percussive delivery that flattens everything in sight--fellow actors especially--remains the same.

The reason to have hope for “True Believer” (language-rated R) was that director Joseph Ruben had shown some style before with “The Stepfather.” However “The Stepfather” had Donald Westlake’s gorgeous script. This one, by Wesley Strick, piles coincidence onto improbability and cliche onto unlikelihood until all our good will is used up. Ruben’s stylistic devices, his high angle shots and his black-and-white recountings of courtroom testimony, become just so much cinematic corpse-rouging.

The story involves Eddie Dodd’s redemption through his defense of one single innocent client. He’s a young Korean prisoner in Sing Sing, Shu Kai Kim (Yuji Okumoto), whom we see kill a Neo-Nazi fellow-inmate within the prison, in what might be called very well-prepared self-defense. Somehow, certainly not through anything persuasive about his client, Dodd decides that Kim was innocent of the crime which sent him to Sing Sing in the first place. And the scenario decides that freeing Kim will cleanse Dodd’s soul.

Robert Downey Jr., as Dodd’s wildly idealistic new assistant, is along for a good deal of the cleansing. The characters are a hilarious assortment of tattooed Neo-Nazis, sweaty, corrupt cops and transparently evil lawmen in very high places. Their goings-on are photographed as though the camera, too, was wearing a green eyeshade.

Under Woods’ almost felonious assault, there seems to be one point at which Downey throws up his hands and quits, enlisting Margaret Colin, “private detective Kitty Greer,” in his defection. They move, they speak, but the stuff that galvanizes them as actors seems to have evaporated. Take their hint.