Matthew McConaughey – The Lincoln Lawyer
Laid back Defense Attorney Mickey Haller (Matthew McConaughey) is a charming con man with a Cheshire cat smirk and a license to scam. For him the law is a fun game played for serious money. And nobody has a bigger, more varied bag of tricks than this legal huckster who deals from the backseat of his Lincoln Town Car. His staff includes his driver, Earl (Laurence Mason), his researcher Lorna Taylor (Pell James), and his investigator Frank Levin, (William H. Macy, Jr.)
His clients run the gamut of the social spectrum, from a biker gang, to drug dealers, to prostitutes, to big league players with deep pockets. And through it all, Haller is at all times in control, swinging deals and making money. It doesn’t endear him to the hardworking cops and prosecutors who see him putting criminals back on the street while they’ve been hard at work taking them off.
But the game turns deadly serious when he meets his match in the form of a fresh-faced rich kid, Louis Roulet (Ryan Phillippe) who is older than he looks, but who can adopt a boyish and outraged innocence at will. There’s an old saying that you can’t con a con man. But in this case, Haller is almost persuaded.
But when the similarly battered faces of two young women emerge from the files of an old case and a new, from two different clients, Haller knows he’s in trouble. One victim was a homicide – the other is lucky to be alive. Haller is the attorney of record for both of the accused. And attorney/client privilege still stands — for both. The problem is — one is innocent — one is a psychopath.
A phrase his father used over and over now haunts the lawyer. “There’s no client as scary as an innocent man.” But now that people are dying, and his own loved ones are threatened, he wishes he had listened. He tells his ex-wife Margaret McPherson (Merisa Tomei), that he had always been afraid he would not recognize innocence when he saw it. But now he has come face to face with pure evil, and still he must play the game — and find a way to win at all costs.
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