This engaging courtroom drama aces the trick of grounding its ludicrousness in a convincing facsimile of reality.

The Whole Truth stands out within its evergreen genre for the largely unsensational manner in which it’s presented. Hunt follows actual courtroom procedures more closely than most similar movies...which makes the eventual revelations feel earned.

The Whole Truth is a moderately clever, reasonably entertaining courtroom drama, which is only a problem given the talent involved with bringing something this middle-of-the-road to the screen.

Everyone is clearly hiding something. But more pressing than the mystery of Mike’s silence and his parents’ toxic relationship is the sense of a missed opportunity that permeates the movie, sapping its final twist of the solar-plexus wallop it should have delivered.

The filmmakers are so disengaged from the psyches of its characters that The Whole Truth ultimately plays as little more than the cinematic equivalent of a trashy airport novel that will grip you in the moment before it dissolves from memory immediately afterward.