Customer Reviews

Blind Justice [VHS]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Although derivative of many Oriental films, this short little western still packs a punch.

Assante is a nearly blind gunfighter traveling with a baby. He is looking for the baby's mother, asking everyone he finds about the town she is supposed to be in. He stops in one town where a group of soldiers is guarding a shipment of silver, which is being eyed by the local banditos. The soldiers, trapped, send Assante out for help. All hell breaks loose.

Assante is very good as the embittered gunfighter (and often very funny). His blindness never becomes gimmicky, although one has to wonder how he can ride a horse. He uses his hearing and sense of smell to shoot, how does he know in which direction the horse is going? Adam Baldwin, as the soldier's sergeant, is great, as he distances himself even further from the Baldwin brothers (no, he is not one of them, he can act). Robert Davi has his best role since "Licence to Kill" as the main villain. The one cast liability here is Oscar nominee Elisabeth Shue.

Shue delivers all of her lines in a flat monotonal vaguely-Valley Girl accent. She should be banned from doing any period films ever again. She has one embarassing nude scene, if you can call it that. At one point, she is sitting on a bed in her corset, and you can see part of her nipple mashed up out of her undergarment. It does not look erotic, it looks painful. Assante and Shue's forced romance is also the weakest part of the script.

One scene to watch for is in the climax as a major character is blown through the doors of a building. I rewound that three times just to bask in an action shot I had never seen before.

This feels like the first film of a proposed series that never came to fruition, and with an 85 minute running time, you have to wonder what they cut out. However, I do recommend "Blind Justice."

This is rated (R) for physical violence, strong gun violence, some sexual violence, some gore, profanity, very brief female nudity, and some adult situations.

Borrowing freely from westerns traditional and Italian, as well as from the Japanese Zatoichi series (blind swordfighter/masseur), BLIND JUSTICE works much better, and is a lot more enjoyable, than a mere plot description would indicate.

Armand Assante plays Canaan, a man blinded in Civil War. We see him first dressed in a black duster and wearing thick smoked glasses, walking across the desert with an infant bundled in his arms. Three Mexican banditos approach, whooping and hollering and firing their guns in the air. Canaan is dust, and if he manages to get out of this scrape he crawls into myth.

Although we're led to believe that Canaan retains some sight, his condition seems to have enhanced his other senses to a remarkable degree. Enough so that he's able to hear a scorpion walking across a hitching post from twenty feet and shoot it without touching the hand it was about to crawl onto.

The plot demands all of his super acute faculties. Canaan finds himself in a town under siege. A decimated U.S. Calvary unit is holed up in the local church, sitting on a wagon full of silver and threatened by the dreaded bandit king Alacran (Robert Davi) and his merciless minions. Oh, yeah, and there's that nurse Caroline (Elizabeth Shue) that he's got to kind of fall for, too.

Assante is a great actor, and makes his incredible character believable. The action is well choreographed and fast paced, save for a few flashblacks strategically thrown in to fill in Canaan's back story. I'm not sure we need to know how or why Canaan was blinded, but we find out anyway.

BLIND JUSTICE is compelling and an ingenious western.

The plot of this 1994 HBO movie is fairly simple with a sprinkling of more complex sub-plots, but essentially this movie is about a blind man (played by Armand Assante) on a quest. This western works very well with the exception of one mediocre performance in the female role, but very few [if any] of us watch westerns for the love interest. The strength of this movie is in Assante's excellent performance, as well as the universal appeal this movie will have across the board for fans of traditional American westerns and European [spaghetti] westerns alike. The director seems to borrow heavily from earlier ideas of Corbucci, Garrone and Colizzi, with a healthy measure of John Ford and Howard Hawks influence combined, to create a unique film in the western genre. I have no idea what HBO intended when they funded this film, but in a 2003 era of Dungeons and Dragons and a post-democratic society a little grit, guns and gore goes a long way! Highly recommend.

Strange movie, but good. as all spag. westerns go. Do not think I have seen anything like it before and I have seen alot of movies. But have watched it more than once. It gets to you.

Give Assante some credit for versatility, maybe even for guts. I can't imagine how this read as a script but he found enough to work with that made for an unusual film; I am assuming it was a HBO vehicle or some form of TVM, it had that smaller budget feel to it. Oddly enough, and probably for many actors, a small budget is a burden that they can't overcome as it means their every movement, gesture, line of dialogue has to ring true or the viewer is left with nothing to grab onto for interest in the characters or the storyline (ie. no clever editing, cinematography, location, secondary story/characters etc).

Small budget, big budget, glitzy storyline, skewed storyline, high adventure, gritty cop thriller, whatever, it doesn't matter with Assante, he treats every script that he does (okay, leave out Dead Lenny, which is the only time I will ever say that title again on pain of death) with a sureness and freshness that can be scary. I don't know what it is, except he also makes most of his co-actors better, makes even a peculiar part unexpected and pretty much a director can strip out everything else because they know Assante will just carry the film on his own.

I agree with the other reviewer that the female lead (Elisabeth Shue) was a poor choice, not sure what film she was in but it wasn't this one. I find that a puzzle, as Assante tends to make any female lead just sparkle, there is always a certain zest to the pairings. The only other film I can think of where the female lead just falls flat with him is the Passion and Paradise film, in both cases the common denominator was a too "young" actress/character who simply lacks maturity to be an compatible foil for his characters.

Rather than give away the plot twists in this film - which would be a crime in any film that is going off the reservation as this one does with the "western" genre - I would recommend that you watch it with a eye on how Assante pulls off this unusual character; he is just fun to watch, a consummate professional. You can still wonder at some of the inconsistencies in the storyline and not really suffer from them; heck, it is a character study showpiece for Assante, which in tribute to him is probably what he can bring to any part he does.

I didn't find anything likable or entertaining about this movie. The characters were shallow, the story was ABCDE, and the end uses a silly deux-ex-machina. Much of what happens occurs for no good reason. We're never given the slightest reason to believe that anything that happens is credible. I came to this movie as a fan of the writer (from Carnivale), but was very disappointed that it had absolutely none of the subtlety, depth or interest of his work on Carnivale.

Reading the other positive reviews makes me think it's possible my high expectations led to my disappointment, but I don't think so. This was just too simple, silly and loose for me.

Blind Justice

The Blind gunman Canaan shows justice isn't so blind. It's one of those classic style movies that you can watch over and over - the final church show down is excellent - bad guys get theirs in the end! Action, humor, drama, shoot 'em ups are all there. Great casting, one of Assante's intriguing characters, Adam Baldwin suits his part well, Davi is the perfect outlaw thug, although Elizabeth Shue could have put more depth to her role.

I have had this title on LD for years, but when it was available on DVD, decided to get it. It is unique in the content and I did like the soundtrack, it was unusual. There'I've Said a lot without giving too much away. Regards' Dewarren.

Buy this for your western collection. An unusual piece, brilliantly acted. I highly recommend this.

BLIND JUSTICE is, without a doubt, the greatest movie ever made. More color sequences than CITIZEN KANE, fewer Italian thugs than THE GODFATHER, and by far more horses than CHINATOWN. Above all, it is superbly written. Knauf is a genius.

Daniel Knauf, Writer, BLIND JUSTICE