reviewed by Charity Bishop
     

Some movies surprise you with their ingenuity while other lack creative flow. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a small budget production with an ingenious twist at the end but that falls apart under close scrutiny.

District Attorney Mark Hunter (Michael Douglas) is aiming for a higher seat in the governor's office, but something smells funny about his conviction record. During his last few impossible cases, vital DNA evidence has turned up at the last possible minute to provide proof of guilt. A local aspiring journalist, C.J. Nicholas (Jesse Metcalfe), is onto him but has no proof. So he concocts a hair-brained scheme, intending to choose a recent crime, implicate himself in it, and videotape everything so that when Hunter frames him with DNA evidence, he can reveal corruption and get his fifteen minutes of journalistic fame. His best friend thinks he's insane but agrees to go along with it. The one person he is keeping in the dark is his new girlfriend, Ella (Amber Tamblyn), who works in the DA's office.

When a local prostitute turns up murdered without any evidence of who committed the crime, Nicholas sees the perfect opportunity to launch his plan into motion -- without taking into account the potential consequences. If the plot is sounding absurd to you, that's because it is. There is no court of law that would allow so many last minute DNA submissions and no way local authorities would not find something fishy in Hunter's caseload. Furthermore, the entire idea of framing yourself for a crime and risking life imprisonment and a death sentence (I was not aware that death sentences were handed out for that particular crime in that State) is stupid. Contact the authorities and have them set up a sting operation. True, some of these absurdities are explained in a twist in the last couple of minutes but it leaves gaping holes everywhere else. I lost track of how many plot threads were never wrapped up and how stupid the whole thing was.

It doesn't help that the movie is poorly acted and executed -- portions that should be sped up are slower, and scenes we needed to watch in order to connect with characters are truncated into brief segments. In fact, the entire bust at the end is lacking in emotional impact -- there's no moment of satisfaction in watching Hunter get arrested because it's all compressed into a montage of "... and then..." It's very amateur and I'm not sure how the producers managed to get a powerful actor like Michael Douglas involved. I've seen much better performances from all involved, but here they are all pretty stiff and bland. It has a decent musical score but the writing is choppy and seems to be comprised mostly of profanities. There are at least a half dozen uses of GD (all within a span of two minutes, thanks to a foul-mouthed cop), several abuses of Jesus' name, one f-word, and a couple dozen uses of s***t. Nicholas teases Ella about sleeping together on the first date -- they wait until the second. The camera watches them roll around in bed, heavily breathing in a lip-lock (and shows most of her bare back). It's implied she spends other nights with him; we see most of her bare back and a lot of thigh when she walks around in his shirt the next morning. Violence consists of a brutal car accident, an implosion, and someone being shot multiple times. Grisley crime scene photos are looked at. There are jokes referencing prostitution and mild innuendo.

It's not the most atrocious movie I have ever seen by any means but does lack a great deal of what makes a movie truly entertaining: intelligence. I've seen enough episodes of Law & Order to pick apart the prosecution process, the courtroom trial, the way evidence is procured and the stupidity of doing such a thing. A much better concept would have been Nicholas investigating Hunter prior to his governorship run and uncovering corruption, then Hunter framing him for this girl's murder, and the aftermath of attempting to get him out of prison... but that has been done multiple times before. This tried to be a good movie and failed. I'm not sure whose fault it is, but hopefully the cast will learn from its mistakes and move on to bigger and better things.