At first it's a kick to watch Clint Eastwood play Steve Everett, a horn-dog newsman who doesn't let a wife (Diane Venora) and child (Francesca Eastwood, his real-life daughter) interrupt his babe chasing. Is Clint being Clinton-esque? Even if he's not, these scenes are the liveliest part of this dog-tired movie.

The old man — fired from the New York Times, Steve has moved to California to work for the Oakland Tribune — is bedding the wife of the paper's city editor (a snarling Denis Leary). He's also hitting on a young reporter (Mary McCormack), who yearns to write stories that are worthwhile. "You're twenty-three years old, you don't know anything worthwhile," Steve sasses. It's when the Tribune editor (James Woods, in full pit-bull mode) orders Steve to zip up his pants and handle the final interview with convicted murderer Frank Beachum (a very fine Isaiah Washington) that True Crime takes a wrong turn into the trite.

True Crime is Eastwood's twenty-first film as a director, but his spare, no-nonsense style can't cover the holes in the plot. Didn't the three screenwriters who adapted Andrew Klavan's 1995 novel realize how cliched it is to pin suspense on a race against the clock to save the condemned man from death row? Didn't they see The Player, in which Bruce Willis snatches Julia Roberts from the gas chamber with a laugh line ("Traffic was a bitch") that should have made it impossible to shoot this claptrap again with a straight face? Guess not.

“He Will Break Your Heart”

A lightly swinging Latin-influenced, almost cha-cha groove and close harmonies decorated Jerry Butler's early soul hit "He Will Break Your Heart," delivering a stately warning that his rival would never love his girl like he did. The melody came to Butler as he was driving on the highway from Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Philadelphia with Curtis Mayfield, and as Butler told Rolling Stone, "I just sang the melody and Curtis put the chords to it." The song's premise, Butler added, "was something that I'd lived ...The lyric was an experience rather than a revelation. Whereas music is usually a revelation."