Metacritic reviews

The most surprising courtroom drama since 1985's "Jagged Edge," The Lincoln Lawyer is a don't-miss cinematic page-turner with enough twists to fill five movies.

Populated with a peerless supporting cast, actors who bring just the right history to their roles.

Plot leaps that are fun on paper look generic on screen; here's another lawyer movie in which the characters are only as interesting as the actors playing them.

In the best tradition of mystery thrillers of this sort, it satisfies enough on an emotional level that we're willing to forgive any intellectual, procedural, and logical shortcomings.

The film is only "superior" though, not great. The themes feel shopworn and devotee of crime fiction can point to the any number of antecedents for these characters.

The next step in Matthew McConaughey's inevitable march to network television is The Lincoln Lawyer, a pilot disguised as a feature-length movie, with an entire season's arc crammed into two hours.

It's easy enough to just soak up star Matthew McConaughey's good-ol'-boy appeal and overlook the film's stilted dialogue, bizarre directorial indulgences, excessive running time and boilerplate "Law and Order"-style narrative.

The story, based on the Michael Connelly novel, grows increasingly far-fetched - at times it plays like an expensive pilot for a TV series, maybe a "Young Barnaby Jones" or something.

Undercut by uninspired direction, car-commercial art direction, and a lack of grit that makes the hidebound nature of the genre stand out like an episode of "Matlock" on HBO.

In theory, there's nothing wrong when a movie reminds you of TV. (That's where the fun is, anyway.) But when a movie resembles a long-lost, corduroy-clad episode of "The Rockford Files," that's a problem.