Arthur is a stressed lawyer who is tackling several cases before the court, but always gets disappointed by the flaws of the legal system: he represents an African American cross-dresser, Ralph, and persuades him to settle before the court for the charge of robbery because he will only get a parole, but when Arthur is absent and his friend closes the case, his error has Ralph sentenced to jail, so Ralph commits suicide. McCullaugh has been arrested for a broken car light, the police found out he has the same name as a killer and sent him to jail, so Arthur punched the judge Fleming. When Fleming is charged for raping and beating a woman, he pressures Arthur to defend him before the court. However, when Fleming refuses to hasten the acquittal of McCullaugh, the later rebels in prison and is shot. An angry Arthur thus says that Fleming is guilty of rape in his closing statement, and is thrown out of the court building.
The satirical legal drama screenplay by Valerie Curtin and Barry Levinson was suprisingly sloppily directed by veteran director Norman Jewison, who was not able to balance the uneven, heavy-handed elements of awkward humor and tragedy of legal injustice, and thus the only reason to see "...And Justice for All" is the outstanding performance by the always excellent Al Pacino who once again gives it his best, yet in order to see him the viewers need to pave their way through a whole sea of lukewarm scenes and situations. There are simply too many excess sequences of Arthur visiting his grandfather (Lee Strasberg, Pacino's acting coach), judge Rayford flying with Arthur in a helicopter or Arthur's boring romance with Gail, an underwritten and uninteresting supporting character, which are all pointless and should have been cut, since they needlessly overstretch the movie's running time to two hours. The best parts are precisely the ones where the movie explores Arthur's disillusionment with the personal caprice of judges or utter negligence of lawyers, which render the legal system into a corrupt failure: the tragic fates of the innocent convict McCullaugh and the sensitive cross-dresser Ralph terrified of going to jail ring the strongest. The authors did not know how to shape the story around these best pits, since even the ending seems meagre and incomplete, leaving a subpar impression.
Grade:++
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