| Suspect | |
| Director: | Peter Yates |
| Editing: | Ray Lovejoy |
| Cinematography: | Billy Williams |
| Producer: | Daniel A. Sherkow |
| Music: | Michael Kamen |
| Studio: | ML Delphi Premier Productions |
| Distributor: | Tri-Star Pictures |
| Runtime: | 121 minutes |
| Budget: | $14.5 million[1] |
| Gross: | $18,782,400 |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | English |
Suspect is a 1987 American legal mystery thriller film directed by Peter Yates and starring Cher, Dennis Quaid, and Liam Neeson. Other notable cast members include John Mahoney, Joe Mantegna, Fred Melamed, and Philip Bosco.
A law clerk stumbled onto something while working on the transcripts of a 17-year old case. She approached the trial judge, who gave her a cassette tape before committing suicide. The clerk was found murdered shortly after.
A homeless man was accused of the murder after being caught with the clerk’s wallet and a large knife. To face trial, the homeless man was assigned a public defender, Kathleen Riley (Cher).
Eddie Sanger (Dennis Quaid) failed to get out of jury duty but impressed Riley with his extreme attention to detail. Riley did not believe the homeless man was the murderer and reluctantly teamed up with Sanger hoping to find the real murderer. Judge Matthew Helms (John Mahoney) wanted a speedy trial for personal reasons and denied Riley’s request for more time to investigate the death of a potential witness.
Riley discovered the cassette tape in the law clerk’s car and listened to the confession recorded by the judge who committed suicide. Armed with the tape, Riley revealed in court that Helms was the prosecutor fixing the case discovered by the law clerk. Riley further revealed that Helms was the real murderer.
The film's climactic scene (in which the actual murderer is revealed) was panned by Roger Ebert, whose review noted that it is "as if an Agatha Christie novel evaluated six suspects in a British country house, and then in the last chapter we discover the killer was a guy from next door."[2]
In the Los Angeles Times, film critic Sheila Benson wrote:On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 67%, based on 18 reviews, and an average rating of 6.16/10.[3] On Metacritic — which assigns a weighted mean score — the film has a score of 53 out of 100 based on 13 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[4] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[5]