| RATING: | 60% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
Punishment Fits the Crime
Funny movie about the tragedy of modern US jurisprudence - Boston Legal before Boston Legal - and the public sector mentality of benign neglect and corruption-by-default.
A ham-and-egg lawyer with a reputation for moral rectitude defends the guilty and the innocent with the same skill. The basic theme here is the difference between following the letter of the law and the (much more humane) spirit of the law. The problem for the former type of legal professional is that they find themselves hated for their relentless pursuit of the law in a way that inevitably excludes the purpose of the law: The wronged citizens whom it is meant to serve.
The ethical confusions of the characters serve to make the dramatic moral points of the screenwriters. For example, the difficulty of being moral when one knows one's client is a murderer or a rapist is as tough as the moral problems of the criminals. As in real life, most crimes are trivial and the criminals worthless. The lawyers know this and act accordingly; making you wonder whom is best served - the few well-paid lawyers or the public at large. There really is no effective long-term answer to crime - not the hanging judges nor the rehabilitators nor the punishment-fits-the-crime brigade. The real problem is that the law-abiding cannot renounce their resentful envy of criminals – for often getting away with their crimes - for long enough to deal with the reasons people choose a life of crime.
Unless one realizes that justice is not about establishing truth, but about winning cases, one will go as mad as the legal eagles shown here. In the end, this film offers nothing more than a description of a corrupt system, but no genuine solutions.
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