Do you like murdering your husband?

Double Jeopardy

Worth watching only to see Tommy Lee Jones doing his Columbo impression. You know, the whole asking-seemingly-innocent-questions thing, as well as baiting the crook at the end of the film before the police (in this case the framed wife) enter the room and shouts 'Gotcha, we got all of that on tape, so you might as well come quietly'. It's actually a good impression, but I'm not convinced it was intended to be a direct rip of the Columbo formula. Homage maybe. I don't know.

The rest of the film is pretty average. Ashley Judd's character is a moron, pursuing her husband and son without a hint of subtlety and leaving clues behind her so big that Jones could have seen them from the moon. The whole way she goes about finding her son made me want to shout at the television. She breaks her parole all of two seconds after getting out of prison, and doesn't even try to be careful about it. I'll bet the people she left back in prison were wailing in despair. This is what happens when you invest your trust in someone who claims to be innocent but, unfortunately, is lacking a full deck.

About one of the only good things about the film is that when Jones discovers that Judd has broken parole, he says to her 'You're a fucking idiot' rather than 'Wow, you must really love your son, I was wrong all along, let's fall in love.' Of course, that comes, but not until much later.

Other things worth noting: double jeopardy doesn't work like that. If Judd kills Bruce Greenwood, she's going to prison. Murder is still murder. The fact that it's pre-meditated, that she actually sought him out with the intention of killing him, means that she's not going to get away with it. Sure she'll have her earlier conviction quashed, but the actual murder will be a completely different crime. Different time, different place, different circumstances.

Finally, you know that however the film turns out, Judd will not kill Greenwood in cold blood. You know this because Hollywood does not condone murder. Hollywood does not allow its protagonists in blockbuster pictures to murder people, because protagonists are GOOD people. Only EVIL people commit murder. If she kills him, it will be in self-defence.

How much better would the film have been if she had just walked up to him and popped him? No warning, no preamble. Bullet to the brain. How differently would the son have reacted when she went to pick him up from school? 'Sorry, mum, nice to see you're not dead and all, but you just killed the man I've grown to love this last six years. Couldn't you have sat down and talked things through?'

It would have got rid of the happy-ending, but it sure would have been better to watch.