Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (2009)

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This film is available on “Watch Instantly” on Netflix. This is one of my favorite genres, the courtroom drama. A young reporter just knows that the DA is falsifying evidence so that he NEVER loses a murder case. So to try to prove it, this nut decides to frame himself in a murder case to prove that he’s falsifying evidence. Gee, how could that go wrong?
People either love this or hate it. I find myself somewhere in between. I guess it’s because I love courtroom dramas, and the fact that there are some really big holes in the story are not really that important. If you ride it out and ignore the stupid things that nit-pickers like to fuss about, the story is kind of fun.
It’s low budget, and I’m not sure how they got Michael Douglas to do it. He must be friends with the director, and he didn’t really have much to do. But they are a few twists and turns. Oh, and I guess I should mention this is a remake of at 1956 film by the same name. I haven’t seen that one, but I hear it shows up on Turner Classic Movies once in a while. I’ll have to keep an eye out for it.
So the point of the movie isn’t as some think, the value of direct versus circumstancial evidence. The point is more about false evidence. But it’s not really about that. Twists and turns happen and for a while you’re not sure what’s up anymore. I rated this movie in the middle, as I enjoyed the plot twists and the courtroom antics, and the car chase wasn’t so bad either. But it’s not a great movie either. It could have been paced a bit better. All in all though, I’m glad I slipped this into my “instant” queue. The price was right!

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The only thing that’s beyond a reasonable doubt here is this movie’s stupidity. The film opens with District Attorney Mark Hunter (Michael Douglas) addressing the jury at a murder trial: “The defense would like to tell you that our entire case is circumstantial. There are no eyewitnesses, no ballistic match, no alibi." Odd. One would think that a prosecutor who has scored 17 murder convictions in a row would view the absence of an alibi as something that favors the prosecution and not the defense.

Reporter C.J. Nicholas (Jesse Metcalfe) is convinced that Hunter is corrupt; all 17 convictions were decided by DNA evidence that Nicholas is certain was planted in some way by Hunter. For example, a cigarette butt photographed at a crime scene belongs to a cigarette the defendant is shown smoking in an interrogation video; Nicholas's boss asks him rhetorically, "How could someone plant the cigarette at the crime scene when the interrogation took place three days after the crime scene photographs were taken?"

Undaunted, Nicholas concocts a harebrained scheme to frame himself for the murder of a prostitute using circumstantial evidence (we know it’s harebrained because is a Life of David Gale ripoff). This includes buying a balaclava (and macing it while he’s wearing it. D’oh!) and a pair of sneakers from an "extremely rare" brand that "they stopped making in 1999."

These shoes leave a footprint that matches in “size and weight” one found at the crime scene. I'd say this is a hint that (spoiler) Nicholas is the killer after all (otherwise the "size and weight" thing would be a huge coincidence), but that would be giving Hyams too much credit — especially considering that Nicholas forces a poor Jack Russell to bite him in the calf of his left leg, to recreate the bite received by the murderer courtesy of a witness's dog; however, since he really is the killer, this means he already has a bite mark.

The second bite occurs off-camera, which leads me to assume either Nicholas managed to get the second dog to bite him in exactly the same place as the first, or that Corey (Joel David Moore), his friend and accomplice (in everything but the murder), who is also supposedly a journalist, is unable to tell the difference between a fresh dog bite and an old one. And let's not even talk about the sneakers of which Nicholas actually owns two pairs (so much for «extremely rare»).

The icing on the bullshit cake is that Nicholas's plan depends entirely on Hunter actually being corrupt and willing to plant evidence, even though it's been well established that this is nothing more than a hunch on Nicholas's part, all his evidence of it nothing but pure speculation.