The Lincoln Lawyer (Netflix, 10 Episodes)
Rating: **
It is shocking that this shoddy badly-scripted indifferently-enacted legal series with a tepid diluted denouement , is actually a huge hit.
The Lincoln Lawyer is nowhere near the great American courtroom dramas like The Practice or Boston Legal or even their Indian counterparts like Your Honor and Guilty Minds. At best The Lincoln Lawyer can be described as sporadically engaging. Most of the time, this is a series that doesn’t know its own mind. It lines up the suspects with scant regard for the engagement value provided by people who don’t just need a lawyer. They need a stronger divine invention to solve their messy problems.
Or forget the solutions. Most of the time we don’t even know what their problem is. There is an anorexic millionaire who keeps saying he will lose “everything” is he loses the courtroom case. The series relies heavily on recall-value as we are expected to reverently wait for the tropes and signposts from well-known serials to emerge from the smoky skyline .
Alas, nothing of any import happens. No earthshaking revelations, no Johnny Depp and Heard Amber emerging from the courthouse. This dull-as-a-court-summon, script needed some serious plot revision. The characters are straight-out flat, and the only truly interesting character in this trying-hard-to-be-clever litigational misfire is the young Black woman Izzy(played by Jazz Raycole) who drives the lawyer-hero around in the car that he uses as his office.
Izzy sometimes demonstrates a wisdom beyond her years; she reminded me of Misaki in the highly-acclaimed Japanese film Drive My Car. Yup, Izzy does it.As for the rest, let’s just say they’ve seen better days.
It all begins when defence lawyer Mickey Haller (played with a stiffnecked daftness by Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) is handed over the entire legal empire of a hotshot lawyer who is murdered in a vacant parking lot. The murder doesn’t shock us. We all know what happens to a lone individual in a deserted parking lot who keeps asking, ‘Hello, who’s there?’
Two questions come to mind: why would a down-and-out lawyer, struggling with medication addiction after a car accident, inherit an affluent legal empire from a murdered man unless he is somehow connected with the case? Secondly, do lawyers marry among themselves? Mickey is divorced from one and married to another. I guess being married in one’s own profession saves petrol money.
But who will save this tardy tiresome legal series with a special affiliation to laying out dumb red herrings that don’t only lead nowhere: they don’t even pretend to take the plot to a rational conclusion.
The interesting parts are those incidental cases that fall into Mickey’s lap after the murdered lawyer, like a girl accused of snatching an expensive necklace from a woman’s neck. Turns out the necklace was fake. Quite like the series itself.