Reasonable Doubt

Dir: Peter Howitt

2014

**

Within ten minutes I thought I had predicted the ending to Peter Howitt's 2014 thriller Reasonable Doubt but I was wrong. My predicted ending happened just five minutes later, after that the film lost its intrigue and turned into a contrived and complicated colour-by-numbers thriller without thrill. I'm not sure why I gave the film so much credit to begin with, it never earned it, I think I just thought a film made in 2014 couldn't possibly make all the same mistakes that every other bad thriller from the 80s and 90s had made. It seems the film was a made with a 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' attitude based on a formula that was broke but didn't need fixing because people had grown tired of it and didn't want it anymore. There are essentially two ideas at work in the film's plot, both have been done before, both have been done better and the combination of the two just doesn't work in the slightest. Dominic Cooper tries his best to keep the film going and he does the very best with what he's given but there really wasn't anything he could do to improve the abysmal story-line. Samuel L. Jackson got paid for being him. He did nothing but be himself, with the film makers relying on the scary characters he's played before to enter the viewer’s minds. You can't fault him, it's an easy day in the office and again, he doesn't do anything wrong, everything wrong with the film lies in the plot. It also turns into something of a mindless action film towards the end and also tries to incorporate elements of Se7en and much better serial-killer thrillers. There is a good idea there somewhere, two good ideas in fact, it's just that neither of them surface into a credible thriller or indeed a film you can take seriously.