Find Me Guilty

Sydney Lumet’s FIND ME GUILTY didn’t get a fair shake. I’m not going to argue that it’s brilliant, but it’s pretty good: it didn’t deserve its box office death. Perhaps the marketing had something to do with it. Remember all those posters with Vin Diesel dressed up as Willy Loman? At the time, I remember thinking, “How do you take a guy as charismatic as Diesel and throw all that away?

Well, the movie itself doesn’t throw Diesel’s charisma away. In fact, it relies on that charisma to get us through the true(ish) story of a charismatic New York mobster who charmed a jury into acquitting him and all of his friends in one of the biggest RICO trials to date. It works, and it does so because Diesel has the power to get an audience on his side, whether he’s playing the head of criminal enterprise, an alien convict, or a schlubby but funny gangster. I think the movie would work even better if it didn’t try to give some perspective to the proceedings by reminding us that, yes, the colorful mobsters really are bad guys and the vile prosecutors really are on the side of good. If you want to make us root for Diesel’s character, make us believe in his story, then put us in that juror’s box and convince us that he and his buddies are being unjustly persecuted. As it stands, the movie wants to have it both ways, a la “The Sopranos.” But “The Sopranos” had years to get us to know and love Paulie Walnuts. FIND ME GUILTY only has a couple of hours.

Nevertheless, FIND ME GUILTY stands as a reasonably amusing courtroom comedy, featuring a fine turn by Diesel and yet another remarkable performance from the formidable Peter Dinklage, who plays a co-defending attorney (Oh, how I’d love to have seen that Dinklage RICHARD III he did on stage a while back.). It didn’t make me laugh out loud, but it rocked along pretty well for its two hour running time. I suppose a guy could do worse.