The Lincoln Lawyer (2011) ***/*****

Everything about The Lincoln Lawyer is pure, macho posturing. Right out of the gate it plunges you into a world of vintage cars, lens flared camera work, fast-talking negotiations, and a soundtrack consisting solely of blues, soul, and hip-hop tracks. Matthew McConaughey may be a white dude, but this movie assures you that he is very street. His character, Mick Haller, doesn’t have dialogues with people so much as he has puff-chested contests of posturing. Everything in this film is about one-upsmanship, asserting your dominance over everyone else. We like Haller as a character because he has the grit to always come out on top. If he didn’t, if he got beaten, it wouldn’t be any fun. The Lincoln Lawyer works as escapism from humanity, not an exploration of it. Matthew McConaughey is an alpha male, and as long as we go along on this journey with him, we get to feel a little bit of what that’s like. If The Lincoln Lawyer were a person, he would be a very insecure one; one that annoyed with his constant need for validation. But as a movie he’s an okay guy to go out and get a beer with.

Mick Haller is a character that takes a minute to get a handle on. He’s not a down on his luck lawyer that needs to catch a break. He’s not a successful one that’s on his way up. He’s just kind of a sleazeball. His office isn’t the backseat of a Lincoln Town Car because he’s broke; it’s more because he’s a rambler. And he doesn’t have a driver because he’s ultra successful, it’s because he has so many citations from driving drunk that they’ve taken away his license. He’s good in the courtroom, but he’s just as likely to pull a grift out on the curb to make money than he is to win a case. When we meet him he seems to be content with a career consisting of getting street level thugs out of drug raps. But things change when he’s presented with a high profile, ultra rich client. This isn’t a biker with a grow-op that needs some bailing out. This new client has been picked up for attempted murder, and a pretty brutal one. Louis Roulet (Ryan Phillippe) is a pampered rich boy. His mother is some sort of powerful real estate magnate. The charges against him are that he kicked in a hooker’s door and beat her near to death. He claims he had nothing to do with it, that it’s all a setup to get at his money. And he claims his innocence with passion and sincerity. This is something that Haller doesn’t know how to handle: a client that isn’t guilty.

So for the first time we see Haller out of his element. And things get more intense the further he gets into this new case. If there’s anything The Lincoln Lawyer does really well it’s build tension and create high stakes situations. As Haller digs further into what happened the night the girl was beaten, the situation gets muddier and muddier, more and more dangerous, and closer and closer to his personal life. Eventually Haller is knee deep in conspiracies that involve a past case, threats against his family, and a friend that has been murdered with an antique gun stolen from his office. What the film doesn’t do so well is explore who Haller is as a person. We meet his ex-wife (Marissa Tomei), who is a prosecuting attorney and the mother of his child. But other than that the only people he interacts with are people in his employ. We have his driver Earl (Laurence Mason), his private investigator Frank (William H. Macy), and then that’s about it. Earl seems to exist only to give an excuse for the movie’s awesome soundtrack, and Frank just to move along the plot, so there’s very little character work going on throughout. When we’re first introduced to Tomei’s character we’re led to believe that she is a woman Heller is trying to pick up. We watch them flirt back and forth a little bit, and it doesn’t get revealed until later that they already have a past, as well as a child. I didn’t know what the point of this little subterfuge was or what I was supposed to take from it. And beyond this we don’t get much information about their relationship at all. There is one scene that hints at past troubles stemming from her position as a lawyer trying to put people away and his as a lawyer that tries to get them off, but nothing really comes of it. As a matter of fact, nothing really comes of Heller having a wife and child at all. Mostly it feels like Tomei is just tacked on so the movie doesn’t start to feel like too much time measuring penises in a men’s locker room. The Lincoln Lawyer works fine as a legal thriller, but it never does much as a story about people. Its characters are mostly just pawns to be moved around in service of the plot.

But we’ve got some fine actors playing those pawns. At the center of things, both in this film and in our universe, is McConaughey. This is sure to be talked about as a return to the serious A Time To Kill McConaughey after a long stretch of doing really bad romantic comedies, but it’s not really. They’re just both movies about lawyers. Mick Haller is still very much McConaughey getting by on charm and looks alone. As a matter of fact, there isn’t much serious about this role whatsoever. He even gets in some chances at hammy overacting once the character starts to get disheveled and in over his head. He’s all haggard stumbling and cartoonish grabbing at liquor bottles. But mostly he’s just McConaughey being McConaughey. Similarly, Marissa Tomei is mostly just playing Marissa Tomei as a divorced lawyer. All of the actors here have strong presences and deep holds on our collective memories. They do little more in this film than play off of what they’ve already accomplished in their careers. But for this movie’s purposes, that’s all that is really required. William H. Macy is predictably one of the bright spots. He’s playing William H. Macy with a goofy mustache, what’s better than that? Laurence Mason gets little to do other than play the mystical black man, but I liked him a lot embodying that trope. Bryan Cranston shows up as a police detective that is an adversary to McConaughey for a couple scenes. He gives some good, scowly, angered Bryan Cranston when it’s asked of him. Josh Lucas is an actor that I still get confused with a couple of other actors, but I’ll probably remember him after his role in this. He plays the prosecutor trying to put Phillippe’s character away, and he gets one amazing moment to shine that has endeared him to me. It comes during a “big reveal” segment of the court case and it has overly dramatic camera work to match Lucas’ overly dramatic reactions. And my response there is strange. There were several moments during this film that I was laughing at how ridiculous it was, but I never saw that as a negative. I kind of felt like I was laughing with The Lincoln Lawyer rather than laughing at it. I enjoyed the over the top cat and mouse subterfuge of this lawyer tale the same way that I would enjoy the over the top explosions and headshots of an action movie. And that’s not even to say that The Lincoln Lawyer is self-aware, it’s not, it’s just comfortable with what it is. I found my reactions to it to be at the same time perplexing and refreshing.

I guess that’s the best way to describe what The Lincoln Lawyer is. It’s a film that sets low goals, but consistently hits them. It’s never going to be anything good, because it doesn’t try to be, but it’s skillful enough to not be bad either. I don’t know if that’s a more commendable path to take than aiming high and having a spotty record or not, but I guess it doesn’t really matter. In presenting middling material, The Lincoln Lawyer is a middling movie. Most movies I give a three star rating to try a lot of stuff and only succeed at about half of it. I couldn’t say which approach makes for a better viewing experience, but it’s interesting how different the viewing experiences they create are. I could see this movie being remembered very fondly if it was a 70s era TV show. Give McConaughey some shaggier hair and put this on NBC Tuesday nights in 1976 and The Lincoln Lawyer would probably have been a lot of people’s favorite show. As a feature film in 2011, it’s not something that you’re going to remember for very long. But you could do a lot worse. Go out for a drink with The Lincoln Lawyer, just don’t let it get trashed and sleep at your place afterwards.