Do the Right Thing

The
Lincoln Lawyer

Directed
by Brad Furman 

Runtime: 119 min.

Very little separates The Lincoln Lawyer from a TV-series legal drama except it has a
movie star—Matthew McConaughey—and a team of supporting actors in
client-suspect-convict-cop roles who bring more personality, craft or charm
than TV usually offers. McConaughey plays Mick Haller, an L.A. hustler attorney
who operates out of his chauffeur-driven Lincoln Continental Town Car rather
than an office. It keeps him close to the streets. Contact with street elements
is what maintains his instincts, especially when hired by a wealthy, stealthy
suspect like Ryan Phillippe. Guilt-ridden about a past case in which he forced
client Michael Peña to accept a plea bargain (“My father says the scariest
client is an innocent man”), Haller’s new hustle is to do the right thing. 

Director Brad Furman does a few things right
when Phillippe’s flashback-alibi to a bar pick-up and violent incident work
more precisely and strikingly than the needlessly complicated flashback
structure of The Social Network.
Still, The Lincoln Lawyer’s routine
is only notable for the cast’s lived-in faces: mostly ex-pretty boys who now
have the look of experience and the aura of former genre movie glory—particularly
Michael Pare (Streets of Fire). 

A new face—Laurence Mason, who is cast as Earl
the chauffeur—has the wizened yet youthful friendliness of a genuine street
hustler. He’s like the black guy who backs up the white star on network TV
shows: the hero’s quieter alter ego. But Furman gives Earl a special essence
since The Lincoln Lawyer’s storyline
is propelled by a tasty sampling of R&B classics—Bobby “Blue” Bland’s
“Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City,” Marlena Shaw’s version of Ashford and
Simpson’s “California Soul”—wherever Haller pulls up. These non-diegetic
melodies suggest what Earl might be listening to behind the wheel of the
Lincoln, confirming to himself a sense of the world that Haller struggles to
understand. That’s when the film enlivens its routine; its visual rhythms and
rough sophistication evoke the cruise-y, unpretentious grooves of the
blaxploitation era. Typically, The
Lincoln Lawyer uses black pop culture to bring urban consciousness and
street cunning to a Hollywood film’s slick surface.