Unfortunately, this time out, Eastwood has pursued his interest in ambivalent male protagonists into a dead end. Everett never attains even anti-heroic stature; he’s weak and small, his sourness infects those around him, his pride in his non-belief is not a position of strength but of self-involvement and failure. He may have the number on the speciousness and sensationalism of much of today’s media, but his late-in-the-day rally to find the life-or-death truth of a story is far from salutary; it’s just another instance of orneriness. And because the central character doesn’t gel satisfactorily, neither can the film’s attempt at hybridizing Everett’s newsroom and bedroom shenanigans with issue-driven questions about capital punishment. True Crime lacks focus, for which it tries to compensate in its final third by a standard-issue race against the midnight execution clock.

The problem of the film is perfectly exemplified at the end by Everett’s car chase sequence. As the wrongly accused man (Isaiah Washington) is wheeled into the chamber for the lethal injection, the audience is expected to root for the guy who’s trying to get to the prison with last-minute evidence. It seems the crowning miscalculation that Everett, completely loaded after falling off the wagon that night and driving at 80 mph through city traffic, probably comes close to killing dozens of innocent people in order to prove one point he’s decided he cares about. This doesn’t come off as moral and dramatic complexity for the audience; it comes off as indulgent lunacy.