Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		2.5

True Crime Blu-ray Movie Review

True-ish at Best

Reviewed by Michael Reuben May 2, 2016

All directors have clunkers on their résumés, and Clint Eastwood is no exception. Adapted from a successful novel by crime writer Andrew Klavan and released in March 1999, True Crime failed to earn back its production cost. Though it's not hard to see what attracted Eastwood to the material, the film has not improved with age. Despite an intriguing array of actors, True Crime suffers from odd pacing, distracting tonal shifts and a case of grievous miscasting. Still, Warner Home Video has given the film an excellent Blu-ray presentation. For fans (or Eastwood completists), the disc will not disappoint.

True Crime centers on two men who are studies in contrasts. One is reporter Steve Everett (Eastwood), of whom it is no exaggeration to say that he's an unregenerate scoundrel. A (barely) reformed alcoholic and serial womanizer, he routinely disappoints his long-suffering wife, Barbara (Diane Venora), and sweet little girl (Francesca Eastwood, the director's daughter). Although he is defended by his editor-in-chief, Alan Mann (James Woods), who enjoys trading barbs and insults with the veteran reporter, Everett is barely tolerated by his immediate superior, Bob Findley (Denis Leary), who prefers his reporters to follow instructions rather than hunches. There's also a personal feud between Everett and Findley that is one of True Crime's many improbable plot points.

Everett was once a hotshot reporter for The New York Times, but he quit out of principle when his editor killed a story that would have damaged the mayor (another improbable plot point, if you're at all familiar with the propensities of the New York press, who live to embarrass the city's elite). Exiled to The Oakland Tribune, Everett continues to follow his gut—or, as he calls it, his "nose". On an earlier criminal case, his nose led him astray, which helped prompt his new-found sobriety. Now, a last-minute substitution that has Everett interviewing a death-row inmate on the day of his execution gives the reporter a second chance.

The inmate is Frank Louis Beechum (Isaiah Washington, The 100), and he is the film's second protagonist. Despite a hard youth and a criminal record, Beechum transformed himself into a family man, a devout Christian and a solid citizen—until he was arrested and convicted for the fatal shooting of a pregnant convenience store clerk. After a trial and six years of appeals, Beechum's time has run out. While the staff of San Quentin prepare for his execution, supervised by the sympathetic Warden Plunkitt (Bernard Hill), Beechum says tearful goodbyes to his wife (LisaGay Hamilton) and daughter (Penny Bae Bridges). Demonstrators for and against the death penalty clash outside the prison.

Within hours of picking up the assignment to interview Beechum, Steve Everett has spotted inconsistencies in testimony, visited the crime scene, impeached the principal witness (an accountant played with nerdy self-righteousness by the late Michael Jeter) and identified an alternative suspect. True Crime is the kind of film where a reporter can walk into a room filled with books, papers and bric-a-brac, and the obscure but essential scrap of information he needs just happens to be on a notepad sitting on the floor in plain view. A well-crafted thriller can skate by on such shortcuts when the story is hurtling forward at top speed, but True Crime has been paced as a character study rather than a thriller. It spends an inordinate amount of time with Everett, his work conflicts and his family troubles, to the point where the film seems more interested in redeeming the reporter (if that's at all possible) than in averting a miscarriage of justice.

Like many directors, Eastwood has often cited the importance of casting a film correctly, but he failed to do so in True Crime. At 68 years old (and looking it), he was too old to play Steve Everett, and the visible age discrepancy between his character and the many women who are supposed to find him irresistible is unlikely and distracting, beginning with the 23-year-old junior colleague (Mary McCormack) he comes close to seducing in the opening scene. Women might swoon for an aging movie star, but that's not the character Eastwood is playing. Everett is supposed to be a deeply flawed individual whose manner and behavior alienate everyone around him, and he should have been played by a character actor without the accumulated baggage that Eastwood brings to the role from a career of tough guys. When Everett tells Beechum that he doesn't give "a rat's ass" about the condemned man's religious faith, the line doesn't convey a newspaperman's calloused indifference, as it should, because it sounds like Dirty Harry talking. Isaiah Washington's Beechum effectively projects the inner turmoil of a condemned man facing his final hours, but Eastwood's Everett doesn't have an iota of credibility—and it's his film.

True Crime Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

True Crime's cinematographer, Jack N. Green, began as a camera operator for Eastwood, graduating to DP with Heartbreak Ridge and continuing through Space Cowboys. Outside Eastwood's Malpaso Productions, Green's work ranges from sci-fi (Serenity) to comedy (Hot Tub Time Machine).

For this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, Warner has created a new 2K scan from an interpositive, and the result is a superbly detailed, film-like image with a natural and finely resolved grain pattern. Green uses the overcast grayness of the San Francisco Bay Area as both an effective contrast to the heightened emotions of the characters and as an extension of the bleakly monochromatic prison environment. Night scenes feature deep blacks, and so do some of the daytime sequences, given Eastwood's well-known propensity for turning down the lights in his interior shots. Even in lower light conditions, though, settings like Everett's favorite bar (tended by the late William Windom), the family home he rarely visits, and the zoo through which he races his daughter at top speed so that he can rush off to an interview, are rendered with picturesque detail.

Following the practice established by its corporate affiliate, the Warner Archive Collection, Warner has encoded True Crime at the healthy average bitrate of 32.95 Mbps.

True Crime Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

True Crime's original 5.1 soundtrack has been encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, and while the mix is relatively contained, it offers a few standout elements. An early sequence involving a traffic incident in a typical Bay Area downpour places rain everywhere, while tires screech in front. The sequences with Beechum are accompanied by distant sounds of the rest of prison life, and the newsroom where Everett works has the familiar sounds of a busy office. For those nostalgic for the era of print media, there's even a short scene with the presses thunderously pumping out the latest edition of the Tribune. The dialogue is clearly rendered throughout, and the score by Eastwood regular Lennie Niehaus (Unforgiven, among many others) deftly mixes jazz with thriller beats.

True Crime Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The extras have been ported over from Warner's DVD release of True Crime, which first appeared in 1999 and was reissued in 2010. As with many of its recent catalog releases, Warner has remastered the film's trailer in 1080p.

• The Scene of the Crime (480i; 1.33:1; 9:27): This promotional featurette includes interviews with Eastwood, Washington, Woods and Leary.



• True Crime: True Stories (480i; 1.33:1; 22:04): Though no doubt unintentional, the effect of this featurette about the efforts of reporter Ray Herndon to free an innocent man from prison is to highlight the improbabilities of True Crime. Herndon, a former Vietnam war correspondent who was then at the Dallas Times Herald, describes the painstaking effort (and frequent setbacks) of establishing an alibi for Michael Anthony Wooten, who was then eight years into a 55-year sentence for armed robbery. Wooten was ultimately exonerated, and Herndon's reporting was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Herndon's account makes the fictional Steve Everett's slipshod, "follow my nose" approach look even lazier than it already does. (Spoiler alert: The footage included from True Crime reveals the entire ending.)



• "Why Should I Care?" Music Video by Diana Krall (480i; 1.33:1;): This is the song heard over the closing titles, written by Eastwood, Carol Bayer Sager and Linda Thompson.



• Trailer (1080p; 1.78:1; 2:29).

True Crime Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Between the stoic performance of Isaiah Washington and the antics of assorted supporting characters (including a former Mrs. Eastwood, Frances Fisher, as a hard-bitten D.A.), True Crime certainly isn't dull, but it's neither exciting as a thriller nor convincing as a character study. The end is particularly jarring, as Eastwood fades from a horrifying scene at the execution to an improbably cheerful Christmas tableau. If only Warner would go back and remaster its earlier releases of Eastwood's better films at this level of quality!