Subtitles:

English, none

Extras:

Peter Hyams has shown himself, with films like ''Busting,'' ''Outland'' and ''Capricorn One,'' to be a stylish, flippant director, capable of generating a great deal of suspense as well as action scenes that really pack a wallop. ''The Star Chamber,'' which opens today at Loews Tower East and other theaters, begins so excitingly that Mr. Hyams appears to have outdone himself.

Two undercover detectives, trailing a suspicious-looking man, find a clever way of obtaining his gun without a search warrant. The man, we know, has murdered several elderly women and stolen their welfare checks. When this man gets to court, the very decent and honorable-looking Judge Steven Hardin (Michael Douglas) knows this, too. But he also knows that the gun has been obtained in a questionable manner and that he cannot uphold the legality of the search. So Judge Hardin lets this murderer go free - and the judge's tormented conscience sets in motion the events that turn ''The Star Chamber'' into a tale of vigilante justice.

Mr. Hyams repeats and builds on several more such episodes, which, dramatically loaded and legally questionable as they may be, are very forceful indeed. So it is a great disappointment, halfway into the movie, to find ''The Star Chamber'' so far off the track that its credibility almost entirely disappears. Judge Hardin, who begins the film as a sympathetic and well-drawn character, eventually finds himself much too deeply enmeshed in developments no audience will believe. And the notion of vigilante justice, to which the title refers (this was the arbitrary and tyrannical English court - abolished in the 17th century - with the power to overrule other judicial bodies) becomes muddled and even neutralized by the time the story is over. .

Where is the justice, High Court Judge Hardin (Douglas) wonders, when the innocent suffer and the clearly guilty go free on a technicality. In books? In the judicial system he has sworn to uphold? Or is he the law? Reluctantly, he joins The Star Chamber, a clandestine society of judges who re-try and pass sentence on certain 'messy' cases. From the opening sequence - a pell-mell chase through a confusion of colour, movement and sound - Hyams constructs a tense and absorbing thriller; but as in previous filmic efforts to confront this elusive moral issue (...And Justice for All, for example), the subtleties escape faster than the criminals. Just as Douglas discovers that he can go only so far along the extra-judicial path, so the film's line of reasoning twists part-way, falters, then ties itself into tangled and inconclusive knots.

Gary Tooze

May 21st, 2013