Culture is a flat circle. Matthew McConaughey He was talking about time in his memorable ‘True Detective’ speech, saying that “Everything we have done or will do, we will do it over and over again forever”, but he can well talk about modern audiovisuals, where all intellectual property is susceptible to being adapted even more than once.
This is the only way to explain the peculiarity that the novels of The Lincoln Lawyer of Michael Connelly be adapted again in serial format after being brought to the big screen. The Serie ‘The Lincoln Lawyer‘ comes to Netflix just over ten years after the main character was played by McConaughey in ‘The Innocent’. And it will hardly give a result as solid as this recommendable film that we have available on Amazon Prime Video.
Walking through the dark corners of the city
The actor plays the character of Michael Haller, a lawyer of notable fame, although of questionable reputation. His specialty is petty criminals, people with few resources but in need of defense when committing crimes, which he manages to save thanks to fine tricks and exploitation of the margins of the legal process. Almost a Saul Goodman with even more glibness and presence, even though his office is the back of a Lincoln Continental.
As if that were not enough, it is known that he has to be driven by a chauffeur after he had a drunk driving accident. So It’s suspicious when an important case suddenly falls into your lap. like that of a young and millionaire playboy (Ryan Phillippe) who is accused of killing a prostitute after a crazy night, although he assures against all odds that he is innocent. Someone who can afford all the legal help in the world goes to a lowlife lawyer whose office is his car? Something doesn’t fit.
All this mystery and the intriguing legal proceedings are the skeleton with which the director Brad Furman sustains an effective old-school thriller. Without pulling great artifices, brings out the strengths of Connelly’s crime novelfrom his cynical and discontented perspective of the streets of Los Angeles, showing the darkness that exists both in the criminal world and in other more “official” environments.
It also finds space to display around the protagonist a series of interesting and lively characterseven if they only appear in one scene.
‘The innocent’: old school thriller
It’s easy to give these secondaries that energy when you have names like Marisa Tomei, William H Macy, John Leguizamo, Michael Pena either Bryan Cranston interpreting them. Although the one who gets the show is clearly Matthew McConaughey, doing a good job of starring in this legal thriller, a genre that he knows well from his experiences in ‘A time to kill’ and ‘Friendship’.
But that way of exploring the character’s moral chiaroscuro is close to that prestigious actor charisma that would explode in movies like ‘Mud’ or ‘Dallas Buyers Club’, as well as in the aforementioned series ‘True Detective’.
With such good collaborators and such good material, Furman just has to shoot efficiently and consistently, which he does without too much fanfare. Pure and hard professionalism that gives a necessary solidity to ‘The innocent’, one of the most formidable and entertaining courtroom thrillers of the last decade.
And he does it in just two hours. Can you really get more with 8 one-hour episodes stretched out by design of the algorithm? Let me doubt it.