Frankly I don’t quite know what Andy Serkin was hoping to achieve. Could any court scene top the one where Pheonix Buchannan is jailed for 10 years and informed he is a disgrace to the noble profession of acting. No, because that was a perfect movie (Unironically).

But on a more serious note, is there a more standard genre of film than a legal drama? I mean, they’re all just very okay. Put in some story of significance, bring in a couple of good actors and a funny moment, and you’ll be fine in the box office. Add in a couple of dodgy legal moments and a character you allegedly care for, that’s a template movie sorted. That’s the main problem I had with Chicago 7, I just felt like I’d seen it before.

The film, based on a true story, focuses on seven men charged with inciting riots and conspiracies in, no not China, America. Protesting about the Vietnam war, the film is mainly set in the court room, with flash backs to the events scattered in between. Eddie Redmayne plays the focussed defendant Tom, while Sacha Baron-Cohen plays the more loose cannon bigger picture hippy defendant Abbie. SBC stole the show and was probably the best bit about the movie, attempting to throw in a pantomime brand of humour into a fairly concerning subject matter.

The choice for the film to start in the courtroom meant that we would have to work out if the party were guilty ourselves, despite the framing of the film suggesting they were clearly innocent. The result was that we were with these seven characters we didn’t care about. The pacing seemed slightly off with long repetitive sections and many court interactions not adding anything to proceedings, and at 129 minutes long, we could have shaved off 15 or 20 minutes.

There really were some clever scenes, switching between Abbie telling the story to an audience, the court room telling the story through a witness and the event happening simultaneously. The problem was that these fun, fast scenes were not in it enough.

Now I’ve said most of my gripes, I need to assure you the film wasn’t awful by any stretch of the imagination. The court was well put together and the editing was fine. The script was mildly amusing and the performances for the most part were fine. The thing is that within 10 minutes, you’ll know exactly what’s about to happen. To it’s credit, the film is a good film for Netflix (It’s a Netflix original), but it’s probably not worth risking a global pandemic to see in the cinema.

While SBC could be in Oscar contention, I think I’m falling out of love with Eddie Redmayne (Or, is Redmaynia over?). I loved him as Stephen Hawking, but slowly, he’s just becoming that moany character who mumbles a lot. I just couldn’t stand his character, although that’s probably a subjective as opposed to an objective.

The film just needed something more exciting in it. An Erin Brokovich character or score maybe. Now that is a good legal drama and it’s on Netflix. Sorry, I digress.

Summary

A perfectly okay film, Chicago 7 has enough there, but very little in terms of anything new. Baron-Cohen makes the film somewhat enjoyable, and it’s a fairly easy safe watch. [Grade: C+]

The Trial Of The Chicago 7 is in limited cinemas now and is on Netflix on October 16th