This is a BRILLIANT journey from the perspective of someone utterly detached from any personal connection to those around him.
The story is told and presented in such a way that you, the viewer, feel as detached as Roman is, but compelled to follow his journey to the end. For although he has difficulty with human interaction, and detached from humanity on a personal level, he feels a strong responsibility for humanity itself.
Denzel, as Roman, is a behind the scenes lawyer, a legal savant with some mental complications (I'm no doctor) which many brilliant people, especially savants, often face.
Colin Ferrell is a successful lawyer who finds himself perplexed by Roman's behaviors while increasingly inspired to adopt Roman's mission in life as he is reminded of the reasons he went into law himself.
As the story unfolds, you find a detached sympathy for Roman in the same way he would feel for you. How uncanny that we can be so manipulated in the acting and direction process, while some viewers leave disappointed with the movie as "flat" or bad because they couldn't get emotionally involved with Roman, silly gooses, that was supposed to happen.
Roman's emotions are absent, or sometimes buried, as in the way he continually failed to express a normal response to the health predicaments of his former legal partner, something presented from the beginning of the movie and throughout.
It's a story which moves fast but isn't an action movie, it has no needless scenes or dialogue. In addition to the story of Roman, it tells the story of one particular concern within our legal system. It certainly deserves much more than the 6.4 rating it currently has. I would give it a solid 7.5 which is quite respectable at IMDb.
