Silly, generic and soulless

Zellweger), but the son who is put on trial. This despite the fact that Loretta has been a victim of her husband’s serial infidelity and abuse for years. Instead, the son, Mike, is the one who is found with the brutally stabbed body and is arrested after officers believe he is making a confession.

The late husband’s lawyer then signs up to defend the number one suspect in his dead client’s murder case. Yes, you read that right, and it’s here that the movie abandons all sense and graduates from a silly little thriller to just ridiculously silly.

Richard Ramsay (played by Keanu Reeves) suspects that the wife is involved, a claim he cannot verify since his client refuses to speak.

The Whole Truth is infuriatingly generic and suffers from a chronic sub-plotting that is not so much intriguing as distracting. The story of Ramsay’s junior partner in the case, Janelle (Gugu Mbatha-raw) and her stalker past, is a neat little seed that is never harvested.

The film is awfully photographed and looks like a TV movie from the Hallmark channel circa 1998. The overbearing narration and insistent flashbacks all come together to bog down what is already a sinking ship.

The ability to create colourful characters that cut through a small town setting that Hunt showed in Frozen River is absent in this courtroom drama that is so soulless you will feel like you are watching an alternative version of Law And Order with just a different cast.

I found myself repeatedly zoning out for large portions of the film. It was the kind of selfdefence mechanism that usually kicks in when watching bad 80s pop videos.

As Ramsay inevitably connects the proverbial dots the film feels less like it is driving to a logical conclusion than hurtling towards an inevitable crash. After watching this film it is difficult to imagine how at some point Reeves and Zellweger were once A-list stars. Any goodwill they might have built up has been undone with this disaster.