Edison

Investigative journalist Josh Pollock (Timberlake) stumbles across a trail of police corruption while covering a court case for a local community newspaper run by Moses Ashford (Freeman), involving cop Reed (LL Cool J) and the murder of a suspect. If you're reading this review you're probably wondering how you've never heard of this film; and why, with such a venerated cast, it never got a cinema release. The answer is a simple as it is definitiv: because it's crap. It employs pretty much every single cop movie cliche in the book, and is strung together with the ineptness of an alcoholic clown performing at a child's birthday party. How television veteran Burke bagged this cast with that script boggles the senses. Kevin Spacey in particular, looks like he's doing someone a favour in a hilariously pointless role, pretending to be relevant to the plot by leering in the background with a smoke in his mouth for most of his scenes. Pace-wise is really where Edison falters most, though; it opens with nothing in the way of credible exposition or character development and stays that way for the majority of its running time. Timberlake is a talented musical artist, a born entertainer if you will - but his performance here is hugely uneven, hinting that he may have jumped up the food chain to leading man all too quickly. Playing a serious investigative journalist with the 'gee, shucks' naivety of Jimmy Olsen, his reporter inevitably coming off as dim-witted and unsympathetic. A laughable sub-plot featuring his girlfriend (Piper Perabo) brings little in the way of emotional context to already hopeless proceedings. Morgan Freeman - a man who routinely makes brilliant look easy - leaves us with a hugely incoherent mess of a character with little to do other than shout at Timberlake for the first few minutes. On the plus side, LL Cool J excels with the only half-decently written character of the lot - bringing as much substance as humanly possible to proceedings, and his torn cop deserved a much better film. It's very nicely-filmed, echoing Seven in terms of visual style; but the comparisons begin and end there. An appalling waste of a top-drawer cast by a director who doesn't seem to have a clue about the general fundamentals of filmmaking. Bowel movement-inducingly bad.