Find Me Guilty (2006)

I never thought I'd say these words, but here goes: I enjoyed a Vin Diesel movie.

Sidney Lumet's 2006 courtroom drama/comedy (my third Lumet film this summer... noticing a pattern yet?) Find Me Guilty suffers from what I like to call "Brad Pitt in Twelve Monkeys" syndrome. This condition of cinema (which will probably soon be retitled "Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight") is not something that speaks ill of the film. Instead, it's high praise for a performance that steps so far outside of the otherwise humdrum career of a lackluster actor and allows the person in question to actually ACT.

The actor in question here is Vin Diesel, who plays Jackie DiNorscio, a New York mobster who elects to defend himself in what becomes the longest trial in federal court history. Though he has no legal experience - save for his self-profession that he's "spent half of my life in jail" - "Jackie Dee" actually does a serviceable job defending himself against an elaborate case built by professional prosecutors.

Chalk it up to Lumet, who I'm sure is responsible for getting this knockdown bang-up performance out of Diesel. After all, this is a guy whose credits include The Pacifier and three Fast and Furious movies. So I wasn't expecting a stellar performance, but Diesel surprises here, virtually unrecognizable as he steps into the shoes of DiNorscio. Other performances here of note include Peter Dinklage as another defense lawyer, who seems miscast because he seems underused; Alex "Moe Greene" Rocco as the surly mob boss at the top of the trial; and Annabella Sciorra, who boils up the screen in her one scene as Jackie's wife.

The screenplay is electrifyingly humorous, with much of the courtroom dialogue allegedly taken from actual court transcripts. If the percent of actual dialogue is as high as a title card leads me to believe, this must have been a real circus to see! Of course, too, Lumet's direction is all right, but nothing calls attention to the direction as in some of his other projects.

One down note on the film is that the momentum it builds in the courtroom scenes - which is considerable and hysterical - is lost in some of the other scenes, so the movie feels like it drags its heels in a few spots. It's also a disappointment to read that, in real life, the jury in the case had been bribed.

The movie on its own, though, as a whole, is perhaps not Sidney Lumet's best work, but it's unquestionably Diesel's best work to date.