Beyond a Reasonable Doubt is a 2009 American crime thriller film written and directed by Peter Hyams, starring Michael Douglas, Jesse Metcalfe and Amber Tamblyn.
[2] In it, a young journalist (Metcalfe) sets himself up as a murderer to expose the unethical practices of a star prosecutor with a trumped up conviction record (Douglas), but finds himself unable to produce the evidence he had prepared to restore his innocence.
Nicholas built his career on an award-winning documentary about a pregnant teenage prostitute in Buffalo, New York, who died of an overdose after the death of her baby.
A former police detective discussed as a candidate for Governor, Hunter built his career on a string of convictions based on last-minute, circumstantial evidence.
Merchant – lead detective on all of Hunter's successful cases – to obtain DNA evidence from suspects in custody and plant it to support a conviction.
Crystal, having already alerted the police, tells Nicholas the flaw in his plan: he is not subject to double jeopardy law because his case was only declared a mistrial.
[11] In June 2005, Franc Reyes was publicly attached to rewrite and direct the film, scheduled to begin shooting in September of that year, but his version did not materialize either.
[12][13] The remake was re-announced in February 2008 at Berlin's European Film Market, with Peter Hyams directing and Michael Douglas headlining the cast.
[14] The director, who wrote the new version himself, had first considered a Doubt retelling in 1990, when RKO boss Ted Hartley offered him to look at the company's library for a potential follow-up to Narrow Margin, but it did not happen at the time.
[17] The new incarnation of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt was pitched as "Youthful Noir", and up-and-coming actors Jesse Metcalfe and Amber Tamblyn were cast alongside Douglas in an effort to introduce the genre to a new generation of viewers.
It was part of a record slate of films shot in 2008 in the state, an attractive destination for producers since the advent of a tax incentive program directed at the movie industry in 2002.
[14] But as the planned October 2, 2009[32] date approached, mentions of the impending opening disappeared,[33][34] and it eventually surfaced on home video thirteen months later via the same company.
The website's critical consensus reads, "Hackneyed and over dramatic, this undercooked courtroom drama suffers from bad dialogue and a twist ending you'll see from a distance.
"[5][6] Several critics were unenthusiastic about the remake from the get-go, pointing to the deficiencies of the 1956 original, which the New York Times′ Jeanette Catsoulis called "flawed",[38] The Hollywood Reporter's Frank Scheck deemed to be "no great shakes to begin with",[30] and the Los Angeles Times′ Robert Abele dismissed as "already a preposterous yarn 50 years ago".
[19] A majority of reviewers decried the film as too conventional, with Sheck summing it up as "mediocre" and noting "several gratuitous actions sequences that don’t add appreciably to the suspense level".
[4] Of the film's narrative, Jason Thurston of TV Guide gave a middling assessment, saying "There's fun to be had in a rickety Coney Island rollercoaster manner, and it's not terrible late at night on the couch with a bag of warm popcorn, though it is just too silly and slight for all its bluster.
[40] Kurt Loder of MTV.com credited the story with "enduring cleverness" and wrote that the "artfully kinked ending, while no longer entirely fresh, does provide a certain formal satisfaction—although by the time it arrives, we barely care.
Shire described it as a "bread and butter psychological suspense score" and called Peter Hyams, with whom he had already done 2010: The Year We Make Contact, "easy to work with".