Directed by Peter Yates. Starring Cher, Dennis Quaid, and Liam Neeson.
If you’ve ever sat through jury duty and thought, This could make a great movie, congratulations — you’ve just pitched Suspect, the 1987 legal thriller that turns a slow, gray Monday in municipal court into 121 minutes of cinematic tedium. This isn’t a thriller. It’s a procedural nap in a trench coat. A movie that asks, What if we gave a courtroom drama a lobotomy, cast a pop icon, and then slowly bled out the suspense like air from a flat tire?
Let’s start with the most miraculous part of the whole endeavor: someone convinced Cher — yes, Cher — to play a public defender. Her character is Kathleen Riley, a burnt-out, chain-smoking attorney with feathered hair and the patience of a saint. She’s assigned to defend a homeless man named Carl Wayne Anderson (Liam Neeson), who is deaf, mute, and probably thinking, I should’ve stayed in Darkman.* Anderson is accused of murdering a government file clerk, because of course he is. The city needs a scapegoat, and what’s more convenient than a scruffy, speechless guy sleeping in the library?
Now, you might think Cher playing a lawyer sounds like stunt casting. That’s because it is. She does her best to bring gravitas to a role written like it was ripped from an old Law & Order spec script and left to rot in a drawer. Every line she delivers is filtered through that signature growl — smoky, exasperated, and just barely invested. You keep expecting her to break into If I Could Turn Back Time during cross-examination.
Enter Dennis Quaid, playing Eddie Sanger, a lobbyist who gets roped into jury duty like he lost a bar bet. He’s supposed to be charming — a brash, rule-breaking wiseass with a heart of gold. But Quaid dials the smarm up to eleven. His grin is so persistent it feels weaponized, like a politician in heat. He’s also the only juror in the history of the legal system who thinks the best way to help a murder trial is to break every possible law, sneak around, dig through confidential files, and then flirt shamelessly with the defense attorney. That’s right — he starts an affair with Cher’s character in the middle of the trial. Because nothing screams legal ethics like sex with your juror.
Let’s pause there. A juror sleeping with the defense attorney. This is the movie’s central romance.
It’s supposed to be steamy. It’s supposed to be forbidden. It’s supposed to be thrilling. Instead, it’s two people with the sexual chemistry of chalk and dryer lint whispering in alleyways like they’re passing nuclear secrets. The script treats this like a heroic rebellion against injustice. In reality, it’s felony-level misconduct. If this case were real, it would be declared a mistrial halfway through the second act, and everyone would be disbarred, imprisoned, or exiled to Canada.
And poor Liam Neeson. Before he was hunting down his daughter or punching wolves, he was stuck here playing Carl, the silent scapegoat with haunted eyes and the screen time of a ghost in a Victorian attic. He’s supposed to be the emotional anchor of the film, but the story forgets him for long stretches, focusing instead on Quaid’s caffeine-fueled Scooby-Doo sleuthing and Cher’s dramatic pacing in dimly lit offices.
Peter Yates, who once directed Bullitt, handles the courtroom scenes like a man bored of his own gavel. The pacing is glacial, the dialogue recycled, and the legal arguments so thin they make daytime TV court shows look like The Paper Chase. The murder mystery — if you can call it that — involves government files, shady cover-ups, and a twist so predictable it may as well have been printed on the poster. Somewhere around the 90-minute mark, you stop caring who did it. You just want someone to do something.
Visually, the movie has all the energy of an overcast Tuesday. Everything is brown — the courtroom, the clothes, the lighting, the plot. The cinematography feels like it was done by someone who hates color and joy. The score, when it isn’t being melodramatic, is actively trying to put you to sleep. It’s like someone gave John Grisham’s high school diary to a tax auditor and said, Make it sing.
What really makes Suspect so hard to swallow isn’t that it’s bad — it’s that it thinks it’s important. It struts around with self-seriousness, offering dull monologues about justice and integrity while the actual plot boils down to a juror/attorney sexcapade and a man who doesn’t talk getting framed because the cops couldn’t be bothered. The movie preens like it’s the moral cousin of To Kill a Mockingbird, but ends up closer to To Bore a Mocking Viewer.
Cher tries. God bless her, she tries. She shows flashes of depth when the script gives her anything resembling substance. But she’s trapped in a role designed to scream “Oscar bait” while forgetting that people need to care about what’s happening. Her big moments of outrage are aimed at cardboard villains and legal technicalities nobody in the audience understands or gives a damn about. Meanwhile, Quaid smirks his way through office buildings and government offices like he’s auditioning for a Mentos commercial.
There are also attempts at suspense — late-night chases, mysterious documents, shadowy figures — but it’s hard to feel tension when the stakes are this muddy and the characters this thin. The final courtroom twist arrives not like a shock, but like an overdue oil change. It wraps up neatly, implausibly, and with all the emotional impact of a golf clap.
So who is the real suspect here?
You. For watching it.
In the end, Suspect is a movie that wants to be many things: a gritty courtroom drama, a romance, a political thriller. But it ends up being a reminder of how easily a decent cast can be sunk by a dumb script and even dumber direction. It’s a movie where everyone acts like something big is happening, but nothing ever does.
RATING: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5) — For completists only. And even then, maybe skip it.
