MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Innocent Man’: Unjust Treatment of the Genre

Like the double-tongued lady in “Hamlet,” “An Innocent Man” (citywide) protests too much.

This cautionary thriller about an unjustly imprisoned airline mechanic has a chance to be a canny blend of gutsy melodrama and “J’Accuse” against the prison system. But, by the end, it has gone as slick and corrupt as the crafty old con (F. Murray Abraham) who advises Tom Selleck’s framed Jimmie Rainwood on jail survival. On a fundamental moral level, “An Innocent Man” is guilty as hell.

Hell, indeed, is the chasm that seems to be opening here at first. Like Hitchcock’s “Wrong Man,” Selleck’s Rainwood is a luckless bystander: Two wild and crazy narcs, Parnell (David Rasche) and Scalise (Richard Young), get an address wrong, break into his house and shoot him down. The writer, Larry Brothers, obviously hates these gonzo cops: a pair of cocaine-tooting, hedonistic, trigger-happy cowboys who get sexually excited during their raids. When they discover their error, they barely hesitate to cover their tracks, planting drugs and a real gun on the unconscious Rainwood and railroading him into jail.

Brothers had a good design: The innocent, solid Rainwood in the slammer and these rotten cops running wild on the outside, threatening Rainwood’s wife (Laila Robins). But then, the movie takes a sharp, incredibly miscalculated turn. Faced with intimidation and rape by a prison gang of blacks, Rainwood is counseled by Abraham’s wise old Virgil Cane to kill the ringleader, Jingles (Bruce A. Young). And, after a beating and a gang rape--which looks something like a fraternity hazing--he does, stabbing Jingles with a homemade shiv in the prison urinal after sneaking up on him from behind.

It’s a sad, sour moment. How does anyone involved justify a scene where the “hero” murders an unarmed, if obviously dangerous, man with total impunity? It is even worse where there is the implication that killing makes you more of a man, gets you accepted into the jolly jail-yard fraternity, puts a stop to strangers stealing your toothpaste

In a genuinely realistic movie with recognizable, flawed characters, scenes like this could work. But Rainwood is a standard big-movie-star part: drained of moral flaws, a generic innocent man. Selleck plays him without agony, without reflection, with the stoicism of a born camera subject. He learns the moves of murder and jail-yard machismo as if it were another basketball game. We’re left to conclude that this is the way life is. You’ve got to kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. It’s an ugly twist and it leads into the movie’s vapid last act, with the wild and crazy narcs snared in a ridiculously complex set-up involving Mafiosi, Jewish lawyers and yet another hostage standoff.

Director Peter Yates probably wants some of the gritty, underworld realism of his 1973 “Friends of Eddie Coyle,” but he’s hamstrung. The doses of prison argot and atmosphere drain this movie of its rightful outrage--as if the persecuted Yakov Bok in “The Fixer” had been turned into the “Terminator.” Instead of making the fairy tale real, they make it a nightmare of sadistic wish fulfillment and penal envy, with situations culled from bad movies and names and titles culled from rock songs.

The good things in “An Innocent Man” can be summed up in four words and one initial: F. Murray Abraham, David Rasche.

Abraham gets some macabre humor out of his oily role and Rasche does something more. With his cheerlessly savage smile, ice-blue eyes and slightly ravaged features, he makes Parnell a chilling narcissist-psychopath, the ultimate golden boy gone wrong. Like the crazy surfer CIA agent Rasche played in “Best Defense,” his Parnell magnetizes every scene he’s in.

And there’s a well-deserved, if obvious, indictment of the current penal system, which the movie draws as a factory for turning out more, and more vicious, criminals. Unfortunately, a similar kind of system seems to be cranking out stuff like “An Innocent Man” (MPAA-rated R for language, sex and violence): a factory for turning out more, and more vicious, movies.

‘AN INNOCENT MAN’

A Touchstone Pictures/Silver Screen Partners IV presentation of an Interscope Communications production. Producers Ted Field, Robert W. Cort. Director Peter Yates. Script Larry Brothers. Camera William A. Fraker. Production design Stuart Wurtzel. Editors Stephen A. Rotter, William S. Scharf. Costume design Rita Ryack. Music Howard Shore. With Tom Selleck, F. Murray Abraham, Laila Robins, David Rasche, Richard Young, Badja Djola, Todd Graff.

Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes.

MPAA rating: R (younger than 17 requires an accompanying parent or adult guardian).