You've been there before: standing around in a movie rental store, a Redbox, looking through your Netflix queue—whatever—and sometimes you just know you need to walk out with more than one little movie in your hand. I don't know. Maybe you had fears your first movie isn't going to be so hot. Maybe you have company. Maybe you and your girlfriend couldn't agree on a second movie for your date night and she picked something neither of you had heard of. And maybe, just maybe, you both regretted it immediately and she's still being heckled over such a poor decision.
I started writing this review in June. There's so little to comment on with this movie that it's taken this long for me to get the motivation to even finish this thing. I'm so sorry.
The Premise
Robert Downey Jr. plays Hank, a palette swap of Tony Stark—er, I mean, a wise-cracking attorney whose life is suddenly flipped out of control. In the middle of divorce proceedings and subsequent custody battle, Hank is requested to come back to his rural home following the death of his mother. Hijinks abound and Hank, his father, and two brothers are embroiled in a long-standing family feud that could tear their fragile family balance apart. Subplots occur. The film indeed ends.
Objectively...
There's so very little to actually discuss with The Judge; in fact, it might just be the most cliche movie I have ever seen in my entire life. Just look at the reviews: 7.5 on IMDB, 48 on Rotten Tomatoes, 47 on Metacritic, and 7.2 from users on both of the latter sites. Just a look at the critical response to this movie should give one important takeaway: no matter what your expectations may be, The Judge exudes some sort of overwhelming mediocrity like a force field. Even the box office returns were completely average, overall 1.5 times that of the budget almost exactly.
Future generations will look at The Judge with a confused melancholy while film professors present this as a movie that has been manufactured to an exact science, a product that resembles a movie with no inherent flaws but absolutely zero soul or personality. A star-studded cast of Robert Downey Jr, Robert Duvall, Billy Bob Thornton, Vincent D'Onofrio, Dax Shepherd and more mill about, drink, and reminisce about their terrible relationships for more than two hours.
Every last character is a stereotype. Downey Jr's character is wise-cracking but has all the answers. Duvall is both an angry, unlikable old curmudgeon and the sympathetic, disease-stricken patriarch of the family. D'Onofrio is a former high school football star who works at a car shop (or something, it's really not expanded on), the main character's love interest is his childhood friend who works at a bar, Thornton is a ruthless prosecutor, Shepherd is the nervous amateur lawyer—the character tropes are so ubiquitous that as soon as a character steps on screen you know exactly what he's going to do and say for the entire movie.
No character is more confusingly misused than Jeremy Strong's character, Downey Jr's younger brother with autism. Because the writers of this movie have no understanding of subtlety and the script is so cliche, this character falls under the unfortunate trope of being the I Am Sam sympathetic mentally retarded figure. More than a few scenes are dedicated to this character's love of filming as his family chews the scenery and some sad licensed music plays to make you feel things like a puppet. More disappointing than creating this heartstring-tugging character is that he's used to defuse serious moments by having him repeat a double entendre or someone swearing and the character innocuously repeating it. All I got out of this actor playing a severely impaired character is that The Judge is horribly mean-spirited for the sake of having a weird all-in-one film with every last stereotype possible. You're not What's Eating Gilbert Grape, you're a commercialized product.
Subjectively . . .
All this is to lead to the biggest flaw of this reeking pile of film refuse: subplots. Every last character in this movie exist to fluff out the running time for a completely bland, useless subplot. Hank's daughter at the beginning? Yep, better cram her into a subplot. The father character's lawyer? Let's just have a weird comparison between him and Hank. The father character played by Robert Duvall, aside from being the focus of the main plot, swings from being a remorseless monster to a lovable grandfather between scenes. Of course, because it's hard to really sympathize with a character so heavily steeped in contradiction, The Judge throws in a very heavy-handed subplot about Duvall's character somehow hiding the fact that he is suffering from a severe and very advanced form of cancer.
All I felt out of this was that The Judge is trying too hard to be too many things, and depicting a horrible disease with the tact of a high school kid in a movie with more mood swings than one just felt exploitative and cheap. I'd go so far as to say some of the ways Duvall's disease is portrayed is just tasteless. I didn't get anything out of this movie other than a sense that this C-grade movie was wasting my time.
Speaking of time, The Judge is nearly two and a half hours long.
two
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O N E H U N D R E D F O R T Y O N E M I N U T E S O F Y O U R T I M E
Because every single subplot demands to be given time to flesh out, The Judge doesn't feel like it respects your time. In fact, I got the opposite out of it. And because I don't respect The Judge, here's an example of one of the thrilling stories the movie shoves on you:
Hank's love interest, who works at a bar, is introduced early on and at first serves to unnecessarily expand on their childhood. Later, in a seemingly unrelated note, Hank picks up a girl at the same bar and the two make out, then nothing happens at all. A few scenes later Hank and his love interest (I can't believe her name escapes me so much, but that should be indicative of how memorable any of these characters are) are driving wherever and she introduces her daughter--the girl Hank made out with! Uh oh! And then nothing happens, again. The two drop it and the daughter never appears again...on screen. A few scenes later Barwoman mentions that she got pregnant right after Hank left town, and the implication is that her daughter is also Hank's. The issue, however, isn't that the protagonist made out with his own daughter, the focus is instead placed on his fear that he's been a bad parent to two daughters rather than the groan-inducing typical little girl who of course has her own subplot with Robert Duvall and it's terrible. Near the end of the movie Hank brings up the matter of his daughter to Barwoman who says "oh I was just messing with you, she's your brother's kid." What a relief, he only made out with his niece! Oh, but they forgot about that plot point already, so if the writers aren't worried about it you shouldn't be either.
I can go on but I'd basically have to complain and bellyache about the entire movie. That's about the level of writing you can expect out of it, and no, it doesn't get any better. The main plot is made entirely of legal thriller cliches, there is absolutely nothing original here and it's so crass and tasteless that it feels immediately like a bargain bin version of better movies. And that might just be the worse thing here: with such high production values and one of the most impressive casts in recent years, The Judge meanders until it lands with a big wet plop.
The Verdict
Please do yourself a favor and skip this movie. Tell your friends to skip The Judge. All I want to do is shame everyone involved with this movie and just brood over the time I wasted with it. It's taken me like five months to force myself to put how much I hate this movie into words and, as you can see, I couldn't. I can't possibly write a review long enough to properly describe how much I dislike this travesty. It's crass, it's tasteless, IT'S A MILLION HOURS LONG, even Billy Bob Thornton phones it in here. Please don't watch this movie. If you see it in Red Box, nudge the person beside you to say "oh man, that movie is so stupid and pointless, don't you hate it? That Subjective Objective review was so good and on-point and awesome and I love that guy." Don't let them avert your heated gaze full of determination. You're better than them. You're better than The Judge--that might not be a high bar of excellence but I believe in you.
Terrible.
