The movie that turned the “King Of The Rom-Com” into the Comeback Kid.
Here is Matthew McConaughey’s major filmography from 2000 to 2009:
The Wedding Planner, Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past, Frailty, Reign Of Fire, How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, Sahara, Fool’s Gold, Tropic Thunder, Failure To Launch, and one episode of Sex & The City.
Essentially a mix of bad comedies or bad action movies (or, in the case of Frailty, one great thriller that nobody went to see).
And here is McConaughey’s major filmography from 2010 to 2015:
Killer Joe, Magic Mike, Bernie, Mud, The Paperboy, Interstellar, True Detective, Dallas Buyers Club, The Wolf Of Wall Street, and a few episodes of Eastbound & Down.
Essentially a mix of fantastic dramas and super-dark thrillers (or, in the case of Interstellar, a massive blockbuster that everybody went to see).
Something happened between the end of the first decade of the 21st century, and the start of the second. McConaughey made a conscious decision to re-direct his career trajectory, and that all kicked off with The Lincoln Lawyer.
Released in March 2011, the movie wasn’t a runaway success at the box office ($87 million from a $40 million budget), and, at the time, wasn’t a massive hit with the critics either (63% on Metacritic would indicate a majority of 3-star reviews).
What it did do, though, was make people sit up and take notice of Matthew McConaughey as a proper actor again, the guy who had grabbed everyone’s attention in the likes of Dazed & Confused, A Time To Kill, Contact and Amistad, before his good looks pigeon-holed him into rom-com arm-candy.
Based on a best-selling novel by Michael Connolly – who also had his works adapted into the Clint Eastwood thriller Blood Work, as well as TV series Bosch – the movie tells the story of lawyer Mickey Haller (McConaughey), who works out of his Lincoln town car.
He is hired to defend a rich playboy (Ryan Phillippe), who has been accused of brutally assaulting a prostitute. Haller finds during his investigations that it has a lot of similar evidence to a previous case he worked which resulted in his client (Michael Pena) getting a life-sentence, despite constantly insisting on his innocence.
The mystery continues to build and build in fantastically plot-twist-y ways, and the rest of the stellar cast – Bryan Cranston, Marisa Tomei, William H Macy, John Leguizamo, Josh Lucas – play their parts to perfection, always leading you down certain paths, convincing you every few minutes that somebody else is the real villain, but then NOPE! RUG PULL!
And, as if that wasn’t enough, it actually features the now-classic track ‘Nightcall’ on the soundtrack, made famous by Drive, but actually appearing on McConaughey’s film several months before Ryan Gosling’s car-based movie was released.
In recent years, McConaughey seems to have gone too far the other way, his movies being too serious to be much fun – Free State Of Jones, Gold, The Dark Tower, The Sea Of Trees – but with some very interesting projects on the horizon, we could see his 2016 and 2017 CV as nothing more than a blip on his comeback trail.
Until then, it is great to go back and see how the McConnaisance all kicked off in the first place.
The Lincoln Lawyer is airing on Film 4 on Sunday 26 November at 11.20pm.
