'Find Me Guilty': Diesel-Fueled

Lumet's Film Has a Creaky Script, but Vin Charms

Vin Diesel turns on the wiseguy charm to defend his honor in Sidney Lumet's "Find Me Guilty." (By Will Hart)

As cinematic distractions go, this one's right up there: the spectacle of the gloriously glabrous action hero Vin Diesel playing a fifty-something real-life Italian American mobster. With hair. And a gut.

Talk about your suspension of disbelief.

But once we got over that eyebrow-raising aspect of Sidney Lumet's "Find Me Guilty," we found ourselves suspending just fine, charmed against our will by Diesel -- despite that rug and a less-than-convincing script. Playing the morally compromised Giacomo "Jackie Dee" DiNorscio, Diesel infuses the made man from the Lucchese crime family with a convincing cocktail of sweetness and rage.

Jackie's already living la vida incarcerated -- doing 30 years after a federal drug sting -- when the feds come at him again in 1985, charging him and 19 of his closest wiseguys from Jersey with 76 counts of racketeering, drug dealing, illegal gambling, credit card fraud and loan sharking. They offer him a deal: Tattle in exchange for a lot less time in the pen. Jackie's response? "[Bleep] you." He's no rat.

At which point we embark upon your classic underdog tale: Jackie, a sixth-grade dropout, decides to defend himself. Never mind his cranky co-defendants and their high-priced legal eagles; never mind that this would turn out to be one of the longest trials in American history (1986-88, when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was the U.S. attorney for New Jersey). Never mind that he's not the swiftest schmo on the block. (Or is he?) After all, he figures he's had plenty of legal experience: "I've been in prison half my life."

Bada-bing.

He's a disruptive force in the courtroom, lobbing one-liners and telling jurors again and again, "I'm not a gangster, I'm a gag -ster." In Diesel's hands, Jackie's plight becomes almost poignant, the jokes a way to bring the love that he craves. It's an intriguing turn for Diesel, long confined to the sweat-and-brawn world of testosterone candy like "XXX" and "The Chronicles of Riddick."

Although we were wooed by Diesel's hirsute performance, we were less enamored of Lumet's scraggly script. Lumet's a writer-director who likes to play around with themes of moral relativism, from "Dog Day Afternoon" to "Prince of the City" to "Running on Empty." But here, the moral ambiguity doesn't quite work: The prosecutor, played by Linus Roache, is cast as the bad guy, all froth and fury as he plots to undermine Jackie, both in and out of the courtroom. He's supposed to be righting wrongs, but we're rooting for the crooks -- and there's not enough nuance or complexity to the characters to pull off the ethical murkiness.

The enormity of the wiseguys' many crimes is given short and comedic shrift. Yes, in one scene, Roache rails against their dastardly deeds, but his speech comes off as too much too late.

Ultimately, "Find Me Guilty," which also stars Ron Silver and Peter Dinklage, is a courtroom drama (much of the dialogue is culled from court transcripts) without a whole lot of drama going on. Sure, it's got shenanigans and double dealings. But underneath the grandstanding and courtroom speechifying, there's precious little dramatic tension at the core of the story. Whatever the outcome of the trial (and in real life it was a humdinger), Jackie's heading right back to the big house. And because of that, he's got nothing to lose. Which doesn't make "Find Me Guilty" a bad movie. But it's not a good one, either.

Find Me Guilty (125 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for wiseguy profanity and wiseguy violence.