MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Judgment’: Night on the Run in Chicago

The perils of taking a wrong turn on the freeway are old hat to any Angeleno but apparently Chicagoans have a lot to learn. In “Judgment Night,” four guys in an RV on their way to a boxing match exit the expressway during a traffic jam and descend into a creepy-crawly off-ramp night-world. They were psyched for vicarious violence--a boxing match--and end up victims of the real thing.

For a movie with not too much on its mind, “Judgment Night” (citywide) is awfully arch. During the course of the film each of the four guys has his day, er, night, of reckoning. Frank (Emilio Estevez) has a loving wife and kids and lives in a tree-lined suburban paradise; his younger brother John (Stephen Dorff) is punkish and hot-tempered; Mike (Cuba Gooding Jr.) is expansive and good-natured; Ray (Jeremy Piven) is craven and filthy rich. (It’s his RV.) When they find themselves pursued through abandoned streets and dead-bolted housing projects by a lethal, supercilious drug-lord (Denis Leary) and his lunky minions, they discover what they’re really made of.

Of course, the discoveries aren’t very startling, since nobody really undergoes a big change. The good guys get better, the cowards get more cowardly, the nuts get nuttier. Fallon, the drug lord, spouts the kind of fancy dialogue that might sound better coming out of the mouth of a James Bond villain, or Patrick McGoohan. He’s so highhandedly ga-ga that you’re surprised he deigns to talk to anybody . (Like any good villain, he saves his best bons mots for the moments just before his kills.)

You get the feeling that Fallon is the bad guy because he’s well-read and witty, not because he kills people. And Ray is a creep because he’s wealthy. In this movie, only the dogged, middle-class family man comes across as a hero. It’s the filmmakers’ way of passing judgment.

Given the opportunities for gratuitous mayhem, director Stephen Hopkins, working from a script by Lewis Colick, is reasonably restrained. He’s aided by his cinematographer, Peter Levy, who gets some real variation out of what might have been undifferentiated darkness.

Recent stalk-and-kill fantasies like “Trespass” and “Hard Target” were snazzier, though. “Judgment Night” (rated R for strong violence, brutality and language) would have been better off trying to be a solid B picture instead of aiming for a B-plus. Nobody loves a teacher’s pet.

‘Judgment Night’

Emilio Estevez: Frank Wyatt

Cuba Gooding, Jr: Mike Peterson

Denis Leary: Fallon

Jeremy Piven: Ray Cochran

A Universal Pictures release. Director Stephen Hopkins. Producer Gene Levy. Executive producers Lloyd H. Segan, Marilyn Vance. Screenplay by Lewis Colick. Cinematographer Peter Levy. Editor Timothy Wellburn. Costumes Marilyn Vance. Music Alan Silvestri. Production design Joseph Nemec III. Art director Dan Olexiewicz. Set designers Duncan Kennedy, William J. Law III. Set decorator John Dwyer. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

MPAA-rated R (violence, brutality, language).