Judge, The

Synopsis: Hot-shot big city lawyer Hank Palmer (Robert Downey Jr ) returns to his childhood home in Indiana for his mother’s funeral only to find himself having to defend his father (Robert Duvall), the town's judge, on a charge of murder.

The Judge is packaged to stimulate all the familiar audience-approval buttons. If it was a restaurant it would be a four course, all-you-can-eat establishment: the food may be highly processed, enhanced with all manner of crowd-pleasing flavourings and colourings but it’s guaranteed that you won't be asking for more, whichever wayyou take that .  

The two Bobs (three if you count Billy Bob Thornton who plays the prosecuting attorney) are in fine form. Duvall is well within his comfort zone as the crusty old paterfamilias whose adherence to discipline and moral rectitude in the name of good parenting has caused a long-standing rift between him and his rebellious middle son.  As the latter Downey Jr is pretty much his usual self – a charmingly cocky dude with a gift for deflationary repartee and a way with women. Although his role is relatively minor, Thornton stands out in the thespian stakes as the prosecutor determined for his own reasons to take Dad down whilst Vera Farmiga is serviceable enough as the obligatory blonde-tressed love interest.

The John Grisham-style trial sequences and the father-son stoushes provide the most bracing aspects of the film. Unfortunately these are interspersed with long-winded wallows involving Hank and his cute daughter (he and her mother are soon to be divorced), his mentally-handicapped brother (Jeremy Strong ) with a mania for home movies and Farmiga as a winsome former girlfriend. A pruning of a lot of this material may not have resulted in a better movie but at least it would have been shorter and that would have been enough.

And just in case you hadn’t gorged yourself completely with the smorgasbord of familiar menu items the film ends with an artery-clogging  parfait of meringue, jello, apple sauce, whipped cream, chopped nuts and glacé cherries as the various narrative threads are resolved, the Stars and Stripes fluttering over all.  If you’re watching your filmic diet The Judge is best avoided. But if you’re up for a pig-out on mainstream American fare you’ll get your money’s worth here.

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