With a title vague enough to apply to almost any film it’s unlikely that many people will walk into Misconduct with a clear idea of what’s to come. Walking out of the theater, the picture isn’t much clearer, as first time director Shintaro Shimosawa has thrown everything, and the kitchen sink, onto the screen to thrill audiences, mostly resulting in confusion, albeit a stylish and often fun confusion.
Ben (Josh Duhamel) is an ambitious young lawyer whose marriage with Charlotte (Alice Eve) is strained after the death of a child. When Emily (Malin Akerman), a shady ex-girlfriend with unknown motives, contacts him, he both endangers his marriage even further, and is given the ammunition to make his name: incriminating information on Emily’s new boyfriend, pharmaceutical billionaire Arthur Denning (Anthony Hopkins), a long time enemy of Ben’s boss Abrams (Al Pacino). But when Emily is kidnapped and then murdered, Ben is the prime suspect and his life turns to chaos.
Misconduct is certainly not the most coherent or intellectual of thrillers, but it differentiates itself through a "more is more" philosophy towards plot elements. Shimosawa takes what seems at its onset to be a fairly ordinary legal drama and adds enough twists for two or three movies, to the point where it seems some of the interstitial scenes explaining the plot are missing. There’s a hacker, a dead child subplot, and unexplained murders and assaults deployed purely for visual effect. By the time Duhamel is being pursued by a motorcycle-riding-hitman (Byung-hun Lee, whose character is tubercular for some reason), it’s clear we’ve entered a new genre and the film is no worse off for it.
The departure from the logic of reality is accentuated by a bombastic sound design that sounds more suited for outer space than wood-paneled law offices, but adds to the dreamlike tone. Shimosawa has a visual flair, luxuriating in a dark color palette and carefully composed frames that contrast favorably to the handicam chaos of too many modern thrillers. Repeatedly he uses menacingly slow camera pans across a room, often combined with unnervingly quick acts of violence.
The acting is mostly better than the script. Duhamel is serviceable as a normal guy in over his head, though both he and the audience are relieved when he takes off his serious lawyer glasses and starts running around and hitting people. Akerman does a good femme fatale routine before she’s bumped off, and the captivating Alice Eve unexpectedly turns into one of the key characters. Even though Pacino and Hopkins have a regrettable lack of shared screen time, their pairing is very enjoyable as a study in contrasts - the measured, clipped diction of Hopkins against Pacino’s increasingly free-form approach to speaking English. Clearly prizing sensation over story, Misconduct is not very memorable, but it is certainly stylish.
