Okay, so nobody likes Matthew McConaughey. Never heard so many declare the man is at best annoying, at worst a dimwit full of bombast. Having mostlty avoided his films for no other reason than they sounded uninteresting (liked him in Tropic Thunder, though), I came into The Lincoln Lawyer without an ax to grind.

Playing Mick Haller, streetwise lawyer for “scumbags” (sez a fellow attorney to his face), the guy pulls off the role and the film. Helps to have William H. Macy, Marisa Tomei, Ryan Phillippe, Michael Pena, John Leguizamo, and (brilliant as a jailhouse snitch) Josh Whigham on your supporting cast. Favorite scenes involve Mick telling off cops and fellow lawers who look down upon his defense of the downtrodden, or his head-on direct laying down protocol to a client, or his jostlng with his investigator Macy over maneuvering a case through extralegal means.

I have no idea whether the legal stuff in the film holds water, or whether it adopted the Michael Connolly novel faithfully. I do know it’s a gripping, often amusing legal drama with refreshingly not a lot of courtroom yet more than a little sense of reality. Matthew (yea, HIM) told Jay Leno he was surprised in hanging out with lawyers in his research for the film on just how much criminal law work was informal, slang-full, slambang, near constant negotiation rather than anything more crusty. This film way brings it.

8 of 10

Okay, so nobody likes Matthew McConaughey. Never heard so many declare the man is at best annoying, at worst a dimwit full of bombast. Having mostlty avoided his films for no other reason than they sounded uninteresting (liked him in Tropic Thunder, though), I came into The Lincoln Lawyer without an ax to grind.

Playing Mick Haller, streetwise lawyer for “scumbags” (sez a fellow attorney to his face), the guy pulls off the role and the film. Helps to have William H. Macy, Marisa Tomei, Ryan Phillippe, Michael Pena, John Leguizamo, and (brilliant as a jailhouse snitch) Josh Whigham on your supporting cast. Favorite scenes involve Mick telling off cops and fellow lawers who look down upon his defense of the downtrodden, or his head-on direct laying down protocol to a client, or his jostlng with his investigator Macy over maneuvering a case through extralegal means.

I have no idea whether the legal stuff in the film holds water, or whether it adopted the Michael Connolly novel faithfully. I do know it’s a gripping, often amusing legal drama with refreshingly not a lot of courtroom yet more than a little sense of reality. Matthew (yea, HIM) told Jay Leno he was surprised in hanging out with lawyers in his research for the film on just how much criminal law work was informal, slang-full, slambang, near constant negotiation rather than anything more crusty. This film way brings it.

8 of 10