High Crimes

Kiss the Girls co-stars Ashley Judd and Morgan Freeman reunite as a salt and pepper attorney defense team in this convoluted adaptation of Joseph Finder’s novel. Judd is a smart, high-profile San Francisco barrister who is arrested along with her husband (Jim Caviezel ) for atrocities he may have committed during a 1988 covert military raid in El Salvador. She is released by the FBI and solicits recovering alcoholic and loose-canon Marine lawyer Freeman to help unravel her spouse’s past and a possible conspiracy, and gut a military tribunal that seems to value judicial expedience much more than truth. The direction by Carl Franklin (One False Move, Devil in a Blue Dress) gleans more exhilaration from the ludicrous thriller plot twists than they deserve as a sense of forced heroics replaces the film’s initial sweaty-palm horrors.