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Misconduct

4/10

Stars: Josh Duhamel, Al Pacino, Anthony Hopkins, Alice Eve, Malin Akerman, Byung-hun Lee, Julia Stiles, Glen Powell

Director: Shintaro Shimosawa

What can you get from two Oscar winners and a current cinema hunk?

The answer here is a seriously thrombotic $11m-budget thriller that, playing in five British cinemas, made only £97/$141 on its opening weekend.

Which, if there is any moral, simply goes to show that a routine, if not actually undernourished TV level movie belongs on television, even when the leads are famous, one for liver-eating and fava beans, the other for reportedly beating Warren Beatty, Robert De Niro and Robert Redford for the career-creating role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather.

The Oscar-winners are, of course, Anthony Hopkins and Al Pacino, the hunk being Josh Duhamel, playing a lawyer with high ethical standards (so perhaps Misconduct is actually a fantasy rather than a thriller?) who is determined to bring to book a crooked pharmaceutical company owner whose latest profit-making drug has killed luckless patients.

Unfortunately for Duhamel, who works in Pacino’s law firm, things soon go dangerously pear-shaped. Hopkins’ former mistress and now Duhamel’s girlfriend (Malin Akerman), from whom he obtained the evidence against the drugs baron, is murdered – followed hardly riveting crime and punishment clichés recreated by screenwriters Simon Boyes and Adam Mason.

But while the storyline becomes more and more complicated, the film fizzles out.

Pacino and Hopkins simply saunter through their roles with little to recall with interest about their by their by-the-book performances, the former hiding behind a beard, the latter rebooting a stress-free riff on Hannibal Lecter leaving Duhamel and a supporting cast that features Alice Eve and Julia Stiles to take the acting honours.

Shintaro Shimosawa’s workmanlike but less-than-memorable directorial debut sees him do what he can with what he has to work with, but with little residual impact.

At one stage during the proceedings, liquor at $250 a bottle is mentioned – maybe sinking this before the film starts could make the movie memorable.

Alan Frank

USA 2016. UK Distributor: Bulldog Film Distribution . Colour.
105 minutes. Widescreen. UK certificate: 15.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 2, Violence/Horror 2, Drugs 1, Swearing 2.

Review date: 12 Jul 2016