MOVIE REVIEW : Talented Cast Bogged Down in Mystery Thriller ‘Cause’

The murder thriller “Just Cause,” starring Sean Connery and Laurence Fishburne, is set in the Florida Everglades. And a good thing, too. This is a thriller that needs all the fronds and storks and gators it can get.

It doesn’t bog down in the bogs, but it’s slow-moving just about everyplace else. It’s the kind of legal-eagle mystery where someone is always stopping someone else every 10 minutes to recap the action--just in case we weren’t paying attention. This two-steps-forward-one-step-back approach makes for one jerky ride.

Scripted from the Jonathan Katzenbach novel by Jeb Stuart and Peter Stone, and directed by Arne Glimcher, “Just Cause” comes across like a mishmash of moments from “Cape Fear” and “In the Heat of the Night” by way of “Strangers on a Train.” Connery plays Paul Armstrong, a Harvard Law professor who decides to take on the case of Bobby Earl (Blair Underwood), a young man on death row he believes unjustly accused eight years earlier of murdering a 10-year-old girl. Armstrong hasn’t practiced law in 25 years but, as his prosecutor wife (Kate Capshaw) tells him, “Every once in a while you gotta get a little bloody--it’s good for the soul.”

Since academia is considered something less than the real world in this movie, Armstrong’s descent into the Everglades is depicted as if it were a jaunt into Hades. (The notion that life in Harvard’s upper echelons might be as back-stabby as life in the backwater small-town precincts of Florida never seems to have crossed the filmmakers’ minds.) The condemned man and the Harvard prof turn out to have something in common--they were both the first in their families to go to college.

But Earl, who passed through the portals of Cornell, is black, and he sees his conviction as an example of old-style racism in the New South, where high-level blacks carry out white supremacist policy. (The arresting officer was black; the murdered girl was white.) He believes his refusal to shuck and jive has condemned him; his confession, obtained after 22 hours of torture at the hands of the local arresting officer, Tanny Brown (Laurence Fishburne), is openly disbelieved by his sympathizers.

The attempt to turn “Just Cause” into some kind of racial statement wears thin fast. And maybe that’s just as well, since, if you bother to examine what the film is ultimately saying, it’s a sweet slice of reactionary-ism.

But you don’t have to get heavy-duty political to poke holes here. Start with the casting. Connery is such a staunch and worldly presence that casting him as a bookish prof tiptoeing through the marshes is a hoot. When a particularly nasty cop tries to scare Armstrong by shaking his hand--hard--you expect Connery to cleave the guy in two instead of wince. And when Brown tries to scare Armstrong by choking him with his seat belt, you expect more of a retaliation than a mere gasping for air.

Connery’s heroic presence is scaled down to near-invisibility here (just as Nick Nolte’s was in “Cape Fear”) and it throws the entire film out of whack. Connery shouldn’t be cast as the common man risen to mythic heights. He’s already mythic. Everyone in this film is supposed to have a double identity but the doubleness is rote. Armstrong is a strong opponent of the death penalty so, of course, we expect his principles to be put to the test. Earl is enraged all right--but is he also guilty? Brown begins the movie as murderous thug-cop who holds a gun inside Earl’s mouth to provoke a confession; in his later scenes he appears to have undergone a sadism-ectomy. His family romps and joshing badinage with Armstrong are played straight, without irony. Sadism in this movie is a spur of the moment thing--it gets written out of the script when it’s no longer required to get a rise out of the audience.

The one exception to all this is Ed Harris’ performance as Blair Sullivan, the Hannibal Lecter-like death row inmate who also claims to have killed the 10-year-old girl. Harris gives his role a fearful grace: He looks like a skinned rabbit, and when he goes into one of his crazy-man trances, his eyes seem to slide upward into his skull. Harris has always been good at playing lethal, but he’s never before been this scary.

If the movie had been about Sullivan it would have kept its viewers awake nights. But audiences for “Just Cause” will be able to sleep soundly, perhaps even catch a few winks in the theater.

* MPAA rating: R, for strong violence and language. Times guidelines: It includes a highly charged torture scene involving a loaded pistol, and lots of corpses.

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‘Just Cause’ Sean Connery: Paul Armstrong Laurence Fishburne: Tanny Brown Kate Capshaw: Laurie Armstrong Blair Underwood: Bobby Earl A Warner Bros. release of a Lee Rich production in association with Fountainbridge Films. Director Arne Glimcher. Producers Glimcher, Lee Rich, Steve Perry. Executive producer Sean Connery. Screenplay by Jeb Stuart and Peter Stone, based on the novel by Jonathan Katzenbach. Cinematographer Lajos Koltai. Editor William Anderson. Costumes Ann Roth, Gary Jones. Music James Newton Howard. Production design Patrizia von Brandenstein. Set decorators Cloudia (Miami), Maria Nay (Naples). Running time: 1 hour, 42 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.