Cher stars in this chilling courtroom thriller as Kathleen Riley, an exhausted Washington, D.C., public defender who is saddled with an impossible case: clearing accused murderer Carl Wayne Anderson (Liam Neeson), a deaf-mute vagrant Vietnam vet.
A young clerk typist (Katie O'Hare) has been found dead, a Supreme Court Justice has taken his own life, and Anderson was found a few feet away from the young woman's body. All the odds seem to be against Kathleen until one of the jurors, Eddie Sanger (Dennis Quaid), a seductive, if rather slippery, Washington lobbyist, decides to help her by searching for clues himself. Determined to prove the innocence of her wrongfully accused client, Kathleen accepts Eddie's help, forming a top-secret and very illegal partnership. In between bouts of snappy verbal sparring, the unlikely team uncovers a sinister conspiracy that puts both their lives in danger and reveals a highly unlikely suspect at the bottom of an extremely well hidden Washington scandal.
Dennis Quaid and Cher are a seductive and witty team in director Peter Yates's entertaining murder mystery that combines cut-throat action with a stylish and imaginative puzzle of clues.