Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Forest Whitaker, William Hurt and Sigourney Weaver all feature, but there’s too little character development and too little dialogue for us to get much of a sense of any of them. Weaver in particular is underused, as if she only had a day available for filming and did it as a favour to the director (Pete Travis).
I was expecting a mind-bending plot twist that never arrived, and overall it’s oddly unsatisfying.
Cher stars as lawyer Kathleen Riley. Liam Neeson plays Carl Wayne Anderson, a homeless Vietnam vet who she defends. Dennis Quaid, meanwhile, is an agribusiness lobbyist.
Cher is great, with an undeniable presence, and to the credit of director Peter Yates the film is never formulaic. But there are too many red herrings for the story to truly satisfy. And it's never entirely clear why the plot required Neeson's character to be deaf and dumb.
