Sinfully Silly Shocks

GUILTY AS SIN (1993)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

When Sidney Lumet attempts to fashion a suspense thriller that aims for psychological complexity, excitement runs at a fever pitch. But that is only partially true because "Guilty as Sin" has shards of complexity about it until they are abandoned in favor of overdone psycho thriller theatrics you have seen a million times.

Rebecca De Mornay is an ambitious Chicago attorney, Jennifer Haines, who will take on any case, well, almost any. When she meets an admiring courtroom spectator, David Greenhill (Don Johnson), trouble has already set in. It turns out that David murdered his rich wife by throwing her out of a high-rise apartment building and he wants Jennifer to defend him because he claims he is innocent. Of course, we and Jennifer both know that he is about as innocent as the knife he whirls around when cutting a sandwich. That particular scene involving a kitchen knife, by the way, happens early enough in the film to make us think that the movie might sink or swim based on whether it decides to be excessively silly or build up to dramatic heights with two attractive actors armed with Triple A battery powered personalities. Yep, you guessed it - it goes for the excess.

Jennifer has a loving boyfriend (Stephen Lang with a perm hairdo, almost unrecognizable) who doesn't like David and wants her to drop his case. David senses this and when Jennifer (who cannot abandon her client despite him threatening her at every turn in scenes that seems ripped out of "Fatal Attraction") tries to frame David, he gets revenge by beating up Lang in a scene as pointless as you can imagine. There's also the devoted Moe (Jack Warden), a detective and long-time friend of Jennifer's who uncovers a few screws are loose in our charming David. 

What starts out as psychological head games slowly becomes overheated melodrama. The final twenty minutes of the movie are so laughably histrionic that I began to wonder if Lumet had actually directed this. There is also an abrupt plot hole involving a witness who arrives out of nowhere and disappears just as quickly (SPOILER: My guess is that the witness was paid off to say what she says but there is no cinematic payoff and thus it is nothing more than a red herring). That is not to say that "Guilty As Sin" isn't crudely entertaining - both the lead stars have magnetism and make this better than it has any right to be. But it is entertaining only in a lazily potboilerish way, and not as the sound, tightly woven psychological noir thriller it should've been.