The original star chamber was an English court under Henry VII, around 1490, and was established in order to prosecute wealthy and powerful individuals whom the lower courts could never have convicted. In this movie the star chamber is made up of 9 people -- neatly distributed along racial and gender lines -- who have decided to sidestep the "law" in order to administer "justice." Can the law really be so blind as it is shown to be in the three cases we first see Judge Michael Douglas dealing with? If so, then "the law, sir, is a ass," to quote Mr. Bumble.
Douglas gets sucked into the secret panel of justices when a vacancy occurs. A couple of murderers who have gotten off on technicalities are offed once more and terminally by a court-hired assassin. None of the members of the star chamber seem to know who he is, because when it is revealed that they just sentenced two innocent men to death, they have no way of stopping the assassin from carrying out his assignment. I wonder how that works. What I mean is, who is the intermediary between the star chamber and the shooter? How does he get paid? And who pays him? The movie never explains just how this "machinery" works.
Michael Douglas plays a conscience stricken bourgeois, which is his forte. He's pretty good. Probably the best performance is Hal Holbrook's. He's a gray-hair fashionably styled avuncular type of judge who is Douglas's mentor and who calls Douglas "Kiddo," a term I haven't heard since elementary school. He's just about equaled by Yaphet Koto as a detective whose role in the story is unclear. But Koto is always reliable. The greatest FACE in the movie belongs to the guy who plays the criminal, Monk. He gives a first-rate imitation of a nervous wreck. His hair is the kind of growth you might imagine taking place somewhere inside your sewer pipe and his eyeballs dominate the screen.
The plot, however, cops out. It develops a bit of rather challenging ambiguity, then dispenses with it. The bad guys are not simply murderers. One of them combines all the most loathsome crimes that are thinkable. They kidnap young boys, drug them, have them perform in pornographic movies, torture them, then deliberately kill them. If they didn't exist, it would not be necessary to invent them.
By the end, the movie has turned into another action extravaganza taking place in one of those "abandoned warehouses" with chains hanging from the ceiling and holes in the floor. The assassin shows up just in time to save Douglas's gluteus maximi. Then, as he turns the shotgun on Douglas himself, he is shot from behind by Yaphet Koto, there for no particular reason. We don't find out what happens to Douglas or the rest of the star chamber. A lot of things are left hanging.
The only conclusion we can draw from this movie is that the law is a set of rules that people have agreed to live by. That applies to formal law and to the informal star chamber. And since the law is a set of norms drawn up by people, and people always disagree with one another and make mistakes, no law is ever going to be perfectly satisfactory. A compromise is always necessary. It's the kind of natural selection process by which the law evolves, piece by piece. The problem illustrated in this movie is that some people, those who form star chambers for example, are unwilling to compromise because they feel they have a monopoly on justice. They KNOW absolutely what is right and what is wrong so they don't feel it necessary to compromise. "Compromise" is a peculiar word. As Margaret Mead pointed out, it carries different connotations in the USA and Britain. In the UK, a compromise is when each side gets a little something out of the deal. In the USA, when you compromise, you lose.
