Movie Review: Find Me Guilty Starring Vin Diesel

Jackie DiNorscio (Vin Diesel) just started serving his 30-year prison term on a trumped-up charge of dealing drugs...trumped up, as he sees it, for the sole purpose of attempting to get him to inform on his friends and acquaintances allegedly involved in the mafia. However, not only does Jackie not rat out his friends (even if he isn't on the best of terms with his old friends), he is also sick and tired of overpaying his do-nothing lawyer. When DiNorscio is charged along with all of the aforementioned "family" of various mob-related crimes he drops a bombshell...he'll be representing himself in this case.

Unfortunately it's pretty hard for an alleged mobster to represent himself in his own style without ruffling a few courtroom feathers and ruffle feathers he does from the very first day...and then proceeds to awe the jury as he shoots down one witness after another and tirelessly defends his friends in what will become the biggest mafia trial in history.

Now I'm one that generally enjoys watching Vin Diesel...but not always the roles he's in. Diesel has made a name for himself in the "tough guy" act along with Sylvester Stalone, Wesley Snipes, Steven Seagal and the like, and unfortunately macho movies are often lacking in plot, script, and pretty much anything other than action and gore. As a result I very nearly passed up Find Me Guilty because some mobster flick starring Vin Diesel sounded a lot like "same old same ol'", but then the line "based on a true story" caught my eye...now this could be good!

I have a firm belief that those who work in Hollywood and write screenplays are, in the past few years, suffering from something I like to call lack of creativity, resulting in tons of movies that rely solely on special effects and numerous sequels of any film that does make it big interspersed with an increasing number of films based off of books. For this reason I've always enjoyed movies that are based on true stories...you can be as unbelievable as you like but if it really happened no one can call it over-the-top and no one can say you're copying this or that previous work unless it too was based on the same bit of history.

As far as I've figured out so far this film stuck by the original events as closely as possible...all the way down to using actual lines from the court records and, contrary to his previous films that show off plenty of greased muscle, Vin Diesel undertook to gain weight for the film so that he could better resemble the real-life person he played.

This is by far the best performance I've ever seen from the aforementioned "tough guy"...when I realized it was to be a courtroom drama with Vin Diesel acting more like a lawyer than a felon I was rather surprised, but he did a completely awesome job. I don't know if Diesel will ever be able to break away from the macho image he's made for himself (or, indeed, if he even wants to) but it's pretty cool to see that he really does have some great acting talent (as opposed to other well-known people with the same sort of image) and I for one would jump at the chance to see him in more dramas and the like instead of actions, and the one comedy I know of (The Pacifier) which was pretty much a flop in my estimation.

Alright, so the leading man did a surprisingly good job...what about everyone else? The second actor that caught my eye was Peter Dinklage who played the lawyer Ben Klandis extremely well, also included were Alex Rocco, Ron Silver and Annabella Sciorra amongst others.

If you're a fan of Grisham-style courtroom dramas and/or films based on true stories this is an excellent film to watch. Overall this is one of the very best of its ilk I've seen in a long time, in fact the only courtroom film I can think of that even comes close in my estimation is A Time to Kill, the film adaptation of John Grisham's novel. I suppose it's hard to have a weak script when you're basing it off of actual dialog, but for everything that wasn't from tapes or transcripts the script was very well put together, the story keeps moving and shows the progression of this over-600-day trial (gosh, hate to be on that jury!) quite well, and remains believable and interesting throughout. This particular film earns my highest praise and I intend to purchase it for my personal collection in the near future.