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Feb 16, 2016 By Zach Hollwedel Web Exclusive

Ben (Josh Duhamel) is an overworked, up-and-coming attorney whose career increasingly infringes upon his home life with his wife, Charlotte (Alice Eve). When his ex-girlfriend, Emily (Malin Akerman), mysteriously reappears in his life, she delivers him the case of a lifetime: the opportunity to take down a corrupt pharmaceutical king, Denning (Anthony Hopkins). Ben’s boss, Abrams (Al Pacino) entrusts the young lawyer with the case, but double-crosses and lethal deception threaten the potentially lucrative settlement Ben is poised to reap.

To date, filmmaker Shintaro Shimosawa’s resume has been dominated primarily by producer roles on various horror films (The Grudge, The Echo), television shows (The Following), and writing credits on about a dozen episodic series. Misconduct marks the Shimosawa’s directorial debut, but it’s a far cry from an enviable calling card. Yes, Shimosawa managed to assemble an impressive cast, but not even screen legends Pacino and Hopkins can save the film from its story flaws: glaring, obvious, gratuitous story flaws. Co-writers Simon Boyes and Adam Mason—for whom this is their eighth collaboration—craft a convoluted, ludicrous story that almost immediately abandons its big pharma angle in favor of a drawn-out and circuitous whodunit. By the end, it doesn’t matter which character did what or who killed who, because none of them are particularly likeable or memorable. No one’s hands are clean, but no one has clear motives, either. The key mystery of the plotline amounts to nothing more than a weak attempt at a shocking reveal,

More than its structural woes, Misconduct suffers the unwarranted showmanship of a rookie director trying too hard to prove he’s earned the cast and project bestowed upon him. Every shot, every angle is ostentatious to the point of distraction. Shimosawa seems compelled to dolly and track and crane even the most basic scenes. He invests too much time in flare and flash and not enough in ironing out the manifold gaps in the plot. Miscondcut boils down to a mortgage payment or two for its A-Listers, a chance to work with legends for the rest of the above-the-line talent, and a swing and a miss for first-time director Shintaro Shimosawa.

www.lionsgate.com/movies/misconduct

Author rating: 4/10