Friday, March 18, 2005

IF THAT'S A CONFESSION, THEN MY ASS IS A BANJO: Slate's David Edelstein is to be commended for trying to compile a list of the worst movie twists ever, but when he leaves out my suggestion of the worst one of all, well, I can gripe to him, but that's still no reason not to share it with you. As I emailed him originally:

Just Cause (1995), starring Sean Connery, Larry Fishburne and Blair Underwood. Connery plays an anti-death penalty law professor trying to get an innocent black man (Underwood) off death row, accused of raping and murdering a child. Connery hates capital punishment so much that he claims he wouldn't even want it for a guy who raped and murdered his wife and daughter. Fuse that plot with the fact that the key witness is Ed Harris as a Hannibal Lecter wannabe, and you're at two-thirds of a merely crappy liberal formula movie, just like The Life of David Gale

Underwood gets freed, thanks to Ed Harris' testimony. But then, it turns out that he really did kill that girl. And that Connery's wife (Kate Capshaw), when she was a young assistant DA, had Underwood arrested on trumped-up charges to boost her resume, and during his incarceration the sheriffs castrated him. Yes, and no one noticed, and there was no Section 1983 litigation.

That abuse turned him into a rapist and murderer (even without the operating equipment). So now that he's free, we've got Cape Fear -- Underwood's revenge on Connery's family in an isolated cabin in the Everglades, with Connery forced to kill Underwood to defend his family from the evil, guilty, castrated black man, because, as the movie makes clear, we really do need to execute these evil Negroes to prevent them from hurting our white families, and capital punishment is awesome, and it's apparently okay to beat confessions out of black people because they're all guilty anyway. Reactionary, racist, awful.

See this link for more HaterAde: ("During the climax, which sees [Capshaw] and her prepubescent daughter sexually menaced by a sweaty, gun-and-knife-wielding, foul-mouthed, bug-eyed [Underwood], did it occur to anyone involved that the setup is so inherently racist that even D.W. Griffith might have thought twice about staging it?").

Did anyone else see this garbage? And is there a worse twist that Edelstein omitted?

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