Just Cause

Despite a few shortcuts and some small but nagging inconsistencies -- not to mention weak performances in a couple of key roles -- Just Cause delivers. Read full review

An intelligent and riveting courtroom thriller. [16 Feb 1995]

It's a rich, humid mix of race, murder, and mystery that works well, even if it doesn't work perfectly. Read full review

Sean Connery's familiar, imposing manner and the seething stares of Laurence Fishburne generate a lot of tension, but it is the mercurial hamminess of Ed Harris as a death-row madman that gives the film the goosing it needs. [17 Feb 1995, p.10C]

Just Cause is an entertaining if overwrought death-row thriller built on the pros and cons of the capital punishment debate, and it owes most of its appeal to the presence of Sean Connery. [17 Feb 1995, p.03]

The movie is generally entertaining, although toward the end director Arne Glimcher and a couple of screenwriters try so hard to make everything fit neatly together in a formulaic package that they end up losing credibility. [17 Feb 1995, p.7E]

Despite its tendency to tread well-traveled roads, Just Cause is filmed with enough energy and craft that, for the majority of its one-hundred minute running time, it's reasonably entertaining. Read full review

With sufficiently intelligent plotting and an A-list cast led by Sean Connery, Just Cause rises above many standard-issue thrillers with enough momentum to grab and hold your attention. [17 Feb 1995, p.I34]

Derived from a novel by former Miami Herald reporter John Katzenbach, it might be described as an inversion of the treasured '50s genre known as the Crusading Liberal Movie, as pioneered by, say, Stanley Kramer. But Just Cause doesn't just invert it, it turns it inside out, on its head, upside down and backward, then kicks it in the tail. [17 Feb 1995]

A good premise spins out of control in the hectic final hour. Read full review

By the end of Just Cause, you’ll be wondering if the world really needed a second remake of Cape Fear. But its first two thirds are tense if not exactly taut, and Fishburne’s performance is a lesson in how a truly inspired actor can breathe quirky life into a tired cliché. Read full review

It's an exploitation B-flick with a grade-A cast. [17 Mar 1995, p.5G]

When the movie's over, you realize that the first hour only seemed convincing: The whole movie is made out of thin air. Read full review

The plot falls with a thud, but the movie is surprisingly involving owing to performances by Connery, who is always an unfaltering standard of honesty and truth; by Fishburne, who has to flip-flop his meanness for frustrated indignation in the end; and by Harris, who actually seethes so hard the veins stand out on his bald skull. Read full review

Just Cause has been directed so antiseptically that it lacks all sense of lifelike detail. Despite good looks and some ostentatious technical polish, it offers a textbook example of direction (by Arne Glimcher) that's utterly out of sync with its subject matter. Read full review

The flip-flops, coincidences, surprising disclosures, far-fetched happenings, TV-style chases and illogically protracted confrontations come flying virtually all at once, obliterating the plausible character work and making the film feel like a hundred others. Read full review

Connery and Fishburne are adversarial along Heat of the Night lines, but director Glimcher makes little of the small-town Deep South locations. Pity. Read full review

Neither conveying the flavor of the swampy South nor juicing the story's murky undercurrents with compositional correlatives, Glimcher's framings and pacings are disappointingly flat, coagulating finally in a batch of cliched action gumbo. [13 Feb 1995]

Just Cause is a textbook example of one rewrite too many. [17 Feb 1995, p.38]

Just Cause might better have been called "Without a Cause." Or "Without a Clue." [17 Feb 1995, p.C2]

Ultimately, Just Cause is just middling. And that's a shame because, for two blistering acts, it promises to be a suspense thriller worthy of the name. [17 Feb 1995]

For a story with so much going for it — including an interesting cast — Just Cause is just not taut and thrilling enough. Read full review

Although the first hour builds effective suspense, the story sags into a warmed-over combination of The Silence of the Lambs and both versions of Cape Fear, and the violent climax looks like it was shot in an Everglades theme park. [17 Feb 1995, p.13]

The movie loses its way, piling on pointless narrative twists and relying more and more on very contrived coincidence. [07 Apr 1995, p.13]

The longer you stay with it, the more routine and uninspired it seems -- not to mention cowardly. Read full review

It's brutal, horribly manipulative, and we've seen this stuff before in better pictures. Read full review

Breaking the golden rule of thrillers - don't let the audience guess the ending from 15 minutes in - this just becomes largely pointless. Read full review

If the movie had been about Sullivan it would have kept its viewers awake nights. But audiences for Just Cause will be able to sleep soundly, perhaps even catch a few winks in the theater. Read full review

A slow-moving legal thriller that fills the many idle moments with scenes plucked from a random selection of Hollywood standards. [17 Feb 1995, p.52]

This suspense thriller is scary, all right, but it's also distasteful and manipulative. [17 Feb 1995, p.AE22]