This film was an early Martin Campbell film (Casino Royale, 2006) I thought this film was really good, the performances both from Gary Oldman and Kevin Bacon were brilliant. Gary Oldman played the brilliant and successful lawyer who defended Kevin Bacon in court with suspicion of Murder. Kevin Bacon gets off, but doesn't leave Gary Oldman's character alone, Oldman has suspicion that he was guilty, and didn't want to defend him again. The tension between Gary Oldman and Bacon was brilliant, For an oldish film it was very good. There have been many films like these in the past, but this was one of the first films to have that idea that the suspect is not innocent. It's interesting to see just how young Oldman and Bacon are in the film, but Oldman gives one of his greatest performances i've ever seen, along with State of Grace (1990) This film is definitely worth seeing!

Tangled in its superficiality, trying to be something more than just an ordinary thriller (and that's what this really is) about an psycho out of control "Criminal Law" wastes everything and everybody. Sadly, the movie couldn't warn us earlier, like 10 minutes from watching this and you would had the chance to know this might be an disaster and simply walk out of it. No, it goes quite well until the plot creates a mess bigger than the Everest and the K2 together (and director Martin Campbell, director of this, was in the latter in "Vertical Limit"), and worst, some of us want to climb it until the end but we can't. Why? Because we're not "trained" enough like the screenwriter from this flick. He and only he can decode this messy picture.And to think of how good this could be! Gary Oldman plays an lawyer who just made his client Thiel (Kevin Bacon) free from jail, accused of rape and murder of a woman. Everybody's happy until a new wave of crimes similar to the one thrown on Thiel start off again. But this isn't like "Just Cause", the guy won't say he isn't guilty, rather than that he's gonna commit more and more murders AND will rub on his lawyer face (that lousy privilege between client and defendant) his next moves. It's up to this man to find a way to stop this criminal. Pretty exciting, isn't it? "Criminal Law" becomes problematic when it decides to include random and uninteresting subplots about abortion, Thiel's family, and the lawyer's love interest and then it connects all of this parts together and mess it up real bad. It pretends to be real clever but it never succeeds. Take all that out and trade to saying something about ethics, difference between law and justice (they tried something about that but it wasn't enough), make a substantial dramatic film rather than 'to catch a serial killer' kind of thing and then we would have at least a decent movie, a relevant one. By all means, this is a poorly executed film that only wasted good actors in giving them bad scenes to perform with. Being the script the worst thing of it, we must be ashamed to testify Kevin Bacon giving one of his worst performances of all, completely on the automatic pilot and ridiculous playing the villain; Oldman has good moments when he's not trying to sustain so many different accents into an American role. And why on Earth do the script have to include an strange sex scene with him awkwardly interspersed with him playing squash? Ridiculous!. Hope that the money received by them was worth it because they could've done better than this. If you enjoy both actors I'll highly recommend "JFK" and "Murder in the First" (coincidentally in all of three films their characters never get along). "Criminal Law" I can't and won't suggest. A good idea and a wasted one. Big time! This is what happens when the hands get faster than the brain and the writer is not thinking of what's he doing. 5/10

As usual, I'm in the minority. This film was very compelling! It bears intrigue, suspense, and a high level of atmosphere! Gary Oldman (who is VERY young here) is a defense attorney in a crisis. His client, it seems, should have been convicted for the crime for which Oldman has successfully defended him. That's not a spoiler, by the way, the discovery is made just inside the first act.The rest of the film involves Oldman's character going through all he can in order to get the facts against his client. In the real world, Oldman's character would face being disbarred if his actions were discovered, while the DA and ADA who were involved with that little operation, would face, at the least, disciplinary action.Now, that's not to say that no defense attorney has ever committed the actions Oldman's character commits, however, the consequences are quite clear. Attorney/client privilege is sacred. Violations of that contractual agreement are severe, and should be; therefore, the suspension of belief required herein is a bit high, but since no one who will assist in prosecuting the defense attorney understands to what extent Oldman's character betrays his client, it isn't so great as to break that spell.All in all, I found the performances herein highly entertaining, and the atmospheric drama quite enjoyable. This is one I will watch again.It rates an 8.8/10 from...the Fiend :.

A serial killer who avenges aborted fetuses by strangling their mothers; a lawyer who agrees to defend a man he knows is guilty just to ensure he is convicted. Both of these would make solid premises for a thriller and a legal drama respectively. But combining them, as is done here, proves much less successful. The resulting film is neither suspenseful enough as a thriller, nor well-plotted enough as a legal drama. Neither strand of the story gets the attention it deserves, making it necessary for a legal luminary to reappear in the last quarter to explain, from his deathbed, what we can presume is the point: vigilantism is not the answer; the law may be an imperfect reflection of justice, but it's a close as we can get. Thematically, this is a well-intentioned film. But it's undermined by a disjointed (or perhaps over-edited) script, and some violently hammy acting, especially from the usually excellent Oldman. Martin Campbell's strong visual flair and Jerry Goldsmith's ominous music – though blatantly stolen from Peter Gabriel's song ‘Rhythm of the Heat' – compensate, but nowhere near enough.