High Crimes (2002)

High Crimes arrives from 2002 with the tidy confidence of a studio thriller assembled from proven parts. Ashley Judd plays Claire Kubik, a Marin County attorney whose woodworker husband is seized in Union Square and revealed to be a Marine who vanished twelve years earlier after a massacre in El Salvador. Morgan Freeman, reunited with Judd from Kiss the Girls, turns up as Charlie Grimes, a sour former military lawyer with a grudge and a drinking problem. The machinery is familiar. The courtroom is dim. The twist arrives on schedule and makes a certain amount of nonsense of everything preceding it, a fact the New York Times noted at the time with visible irritation.

The film's social consciousness is modest and mostly incidental. Claire is competent, drives the investigation, and outmaneuvers officers who underestimate her, which is pleasant enough, though the screenplay keeps framing her as a devoted wife first and a litigator second. The Salvadoran village, the massacre, and the Latino witness supply texture and a geopolitical alibi, not an argument about race or empire. Charlie's alcoholism is a personal failing, played for grit. Joseph Finder's novel has been reshaped into something blunter and less curious.

Beyond that, the cupboard is bare. No romance exists outside the heterosexual frame, no environmental worry intrudes, no economic critique surfaces, no body politics, no neurodivergent reading, no reworking of real history. The military cover-up is invented, and the film treats it as a puzzle to solve instead of a cause to champion. Where it gestures toward sermonizing, it does so in the register of generic legal outrage: courts that bend to national security, brass that buries its crimes. That is the moral weather of every third thriller. What remains is a competent, humorless exercise that asks little of its audience and rewards that little unevenly. We classify it, file it, and move along.