Review of The Wronged Man Directed by Tom Mcloughlin rating *** 1/2
I recently went to Blockbuster and walked out with two movies. The first was Hot Tub Time Machine. The second was a movie I just happened to see on the shelf titled The Wronged Man. Now I can’t defend my choice of Hot Tub Time Machine. It looked like it might be funny. It had John Cusack. It had a picture of a scantily clad woman on the DVD cover. So how bad could it be? Okay, it was bad. It was beyond bad. It was a one line joke that wouldn’t have made it as a SNL skit.
So that brings me to the second movie. Anyone who spends any time on this site will know that I am a fan of wrongful conviction stories. I have reviewed countless books, films, and documentaries covering this topic. Dateline and 48 Hours seem to have a wrongful conviction story on just about every week, especially recently. I wrote about Dateline’s The Mystery on Rock Hill a few weeks ago. They followed that up with two more stories Circle of Friends and The House on Murder Mountain. Both are compelling stories. But I have been covering so many wrongful conviction stories I didn’t want to seem like that was the theme of this blog. The Circle of Friends story really got me ticked off at our justice system. In that story the police threatened, intimidated, and lied to two young men, convincing them to implicate their friend who they knew was innocent. The next day they recanted their statements, but it was too late. The poor kid is still in prison. But what really ticked me off is that the prosecutor in the case was so adamant that he was right that he charged the two men and one woman, all who testified for the defense, with perjury. So not only can’t this prosecutor admit that he screwed up, he had to damage three more people to prove his point. What a clown.