Conviction – review

Starting off with that clunking double-meaning in the title, this well-intentioned picture plods unrevealingly through the true-life drama of a man wrongly imprisoned for murder in 1983, and the battle of his sister – loyally and unshakably certain of his innocence – to get legal training to reverse the guilty verdict. Sam Rockwell plays Kenny Waters, a regular guy with a temper and a violent streak; Hilary Swank plays his sister Betty Anne, intensely close to her brother and once a bit of a tearaway like him. Melissa Leo plays Nancy Taylor, the flawed and driven cop who has her eye on the insolent Kenny.

When an old lady is brutally murdered, officer Taylor produces a string of witnesses who testify that Kenny bragged about having done it. This circumstantial hearsay is enough to send him down for life. But DNA technology becomes available in the 90s and Betty Anne realises she can get Kenny off – but have the cops kept the evidence? And so the film rolls along to a predictable conclusion: Rockwell's Kenny isn't very interesting and Swank plays her heroine with supercilious blandness, and nothing like the gusto of Julia Roberts's Erin Brockovich.

The film flirts occasionally with the idea of ambiguity and suspense – might Kenny have done it, after all? – but though this could have added some much-needed interest and indeed created a different sort of film, this one must maintain Kenny's innocence at all times. A far more interesting movie could have been made about Taylor: Leo's presence in the film is all too fleeting. This police officer's own motives and methods for bringing Kenny down are called into question – but is she the bad guy or not? This earnest, dull film is not interested in the answers to that one.