The four characters intermingle, the two cops get kidnapped by the criminals and one of them is shot in the middle of an onion field. Leaving the other one to escape into the night. He's able to successfully escaped and the two criminals are arrested separate from each other and accusing the other one of murder.
Then the film turns into this weird courtroom drama that goes on for 7 years and becomes this big mess of bureaucracy and and legal procedures.
Pepper throughout the legal drama is the life of one of the cops who survived the shooting. And the gradual decay of his mental state and general well-being as he grows more depressed over the traumas of his dead partner and the constant revisiting of it because of really bad courtroom proceedings.
All of this culminated in an odd story of delinquency procedural Justice and character growth.
Overall I think it's an okay film.
I suspect it would be polarising depending on the person.
Some might love it for what it is, with all the vast changes and different perspectives.
While others may find it infuriating not having a solid coherent plot or sticking with one cinematic structure.
I fall into both categories, liking the difference in perspective and generally wondering just what the film's going to turn into next. But at the same time I found a little aimless and would have preferred if they just stuck with one story or another.
It also didn't help in my case that I was really hoping for a down and rough detective / police crime drama in where a couple of cops just wonder around their beats and try to deal with these criminals.
The film has a very proto 80s style to it. At least in the cinematography: Camera movements and the lighting all feel like they belong in the next decade.
While the character acting and writing comes off more traditional 70s.
All of that works perfectly fine and there's some pretty good performances here too.
You've got James Woods playing this kind of crazy guy who wants to represent himself as his own lawyer in court.
He actually does a phenomenal job of it; being able to save himself from going to death row and even able to get himself out of prison one day.
We're not shown if you'll do anything bad again or if he's changed his ways he may very well be a more sensible person now having leaned all this legal knowledge or he might just go back to being a lowlife Criminal.
There's so many angles in this film we don't get to see like we took a television show grabbed a few of the more intense parts and just smash them into one movie.
And just about every other (major) character has that amount of complexity too. As you see their entire Dynamic change over time.
I have no idea how accurate any of this is to the actual crime in the mid-60s. I assume dramatised and Loosely based on actual facts.
Not that big of a problem for me as I wanted to judge the film on its own Merit without comparing add anything else. And on its own the film does fairly well. Maybe it's completely inaccurate and has no basis on reality but it's still a decent movie.
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