Physical Evidence
                              
Director: Michael Crichton
Year: 1989
Rating: 4.5
After finishing this I checked to see if it was a TV movie because I thought as a TV movie it was kind of predictable and conventional but who expects a lot from a TV movie from back in the 1980s - but it wasn't. It should have been. All of it feels like we have been there a hundred times. A suspended cop who has taken to drink and has food and trash spread all over his apartment. Is that mandatory when you get suspended? Suspended cops should sue. A frame as obvious as a rainy day. A feisty female public defender who must take her Wheaties in the morning. Her annoying yuppie boyfriend who sells bonds and comes home to a sauna and you know she will ditch him for a hunky guy by the end of the film. A trap at the end that the killer falls into like someone who has never watched Mannix or any cop show from the 1970s.  With Burt Reynolds, Theresa Russell and director Michael Crichton you should expect better.


 
The strangest thing is that Reynolds is shunted into the background for much of the film and hands it over to Russell. A bad idea in a bad script that seems pieced together from a dozen other mediocre films. Nothing feels right here from the story to the acting to the set-ups. A kind of amusing beginning when a man goes to hang himself from a bridge and finds a murdered man and then falls off the bridge holding the corpse in his arms. Cute but totally out of tone with the rest of the film. Oh, you might think, a black comedy. No. Joe Paris (Reynolds) is a suspended cop at his apartment - passed out with a black out. The cops arrest him because there is more evidence in his apartment than there was against John Wilkes Booth.

 

Hudson (Russell) is a public defender who gets stuck with small time cases - and the defenders all stand around in a circle jerk joking about her.  And are glad not to get stuck with the case. She grabs it. This will make her. They have no evidence on their side except a couple phony alibis that a wino could break - so they have to find out who did it. Lots of suspects like a Miss Marple mystery. Reynolds keeps a low profile here only to come out and beat up a few people and then go back. He isn't even the hero. He wasn't on a good run at the time after his B.L. Stryker series failed but still Burt how could you let her be the hero. Bad scripts can bring out bad acting and I thought Russell was awful and even the always reliable Ned Beatty as the Prosecutor was over the top like he was back in the woods imitating a pig and desperate to get a plea bargain. Poor Ted McGinley as the boyfriend that you hope Paris will push through a plate glass window has gotten stuck with similar roles so many times. Obnoxious, shallow good-looking yuppie? Call McGinley. If there had been some steamy chemistry between the two leads, it might have helped but they are like a stick of asparagus next to a stick of butter.