An Innocent Man

Directed by Peter Yates

Touchstone Pictures

You can't be all things to all people. The makers of An Innocent Man, Tom Selleck's new action-adventure movie, need to learn this lesson. The film tries to follow too many tangential plot lines and loses the audience's attention in the process.

First-time screenwriter Larry Brothers focuses on the relationship between married couple Kate (Laila Robins) and Jimmie Rainwood (Tom Selleck) to explain Jimmie's perseverence through three years in jail. Robins, however, destroys the credibility of the couple's love. She whines in monotones and never replaces her half-laughing, half-crying expression with solid performance.

Jimmie's prison survival, and the movie's too, really depends on Virgil Cane (F. Murray Abraham), a convict who teaches Jimmie more than how to get by in jail. Abraham introduces integrity to An Innocent Man, first in his portrayal of Virgil and then in Virgil's effect on Jimmie.

In jail, racial tensions and gangs threaten innocent Jimmie. The convicts he encounters match in violence the police who frame him for drug dealing in order to conceal their mistake in busting his house.

Unlike the police, the prisoners abide by their own codes. Virgil teaches Jimmie that unless he "plays by the rules," he will end up the errand boy of a gang. And the gangs show Jimmie how they treat errand boys by stealing his canteen toiletries and beating him up.

By stabbing his main antagonist, Jimmie gains respect as a "stand-up guy." He does not let anyone push him around. And in a parallel to her husband's growth, Kate learns to stand up for herself. After Jimmie's arresting officers harrass her, she complains to their superior, Lt. Fitzgerald, credibly played by Badja Djola. Kate riles Fitzgerald to action by claiming his underlings slandered him.

When the plot turns and the characters gain control of their own justice, An Innocent Man improves. Selleck becomes likeable; his acting gains gusto. Instead of mumbling his poorly written lines, he wields Magnum P.I. inflections. And he infuses emotion into a simple comment about fighting. "It scares me," he says, "but I can handle it."

The audience may not be able to "handle it." The movie's predictably choreographed action scenes lack no blood, but even so, they will bore any Rambo lover. Even William Fraker's excellent camera work could not save these sequences.

The camera provides fine angles of Nevada, Ohio, and California settings. Fraker shoots from a low, upward angle, framing expansive vistas inside four-story jails and outside suburban homes. Scenes of Jimmie at work as an airplane engineer, combined with Howard Shore's music (he composed scores for After Hours and Big), seem like an American Airlines commercial. That's how slick they are.

An Innocent Man scrapes by with a few more scars than Jimmie after a gang fight. Though photographers and editors conceal none of the movie's injuries, their beautiful shots foil Jimmie's jail-sentence better than his home life does.

De-emphasis of tangential storylines and development of Abraham's role would have improved the movie's plot. Although the movie's ambitions overtake its accomplishments, die-hard Tom Selleck fans will like his performance, and F. Murray Abraham does not disappoint.