If we'll buy a female detective named V.I. Warshawski, maybe a lawyer named T.K. Katwuller isn't so far-fetched.
But the plot sure is, with more holes than Swiss cheese, as smart-aleck critics like to say. But "Defenseless" does manage some interest and suspense in its first half.
It's during the second half, when the film begins to wallow in the child pornography and incest that have only been hinted at earlier, that all patience with its contrivances is exhausted.
This cross between "Hardcore" and "Jagged Edge," complete with a slasher killer, is fairly well-directed much of the way (by New Zealander Martin Campbell), but the script (by James Hicks, who wrote "The Morning After," among others) is by-the-numbers and sleazy.
Even the casting is predictable here — gorgeous Barbara Hershey as the loopy attorney, laconic Sam Shepard as the easygoing homicide detective and J.T. Walsh doing his all-purpose good-guy-who-turns-out-to-be-bad-guy routine. (Walsh has played this kind of role so often that the moment he comes on screen he's suspect — especially when he calls Hershey "pie-face.")
The story begins with Hershey trying to get her client-lover (Walsh) off the hook after police find a warehouse he's leasing is being used to make porno flicks (with titles like "Nudes on the Moon") with underage girls. Walsh claims to have known nothing about it and Hershey — if not the audience — believes him.
After all, she reasons, Walsh did admit to being married when they began their affair. Of course, he left out the minor detail that his wife (Mary Beth Hurt) is Hershey's old college roommmate.
But one day, Hurt and Hershey bump into each other in a cafeteria. Hurt insists Hershey come over for dinner and the resulting awkward evening proves unnerving.
Later, when someone is killed, Hershey becomes Shepard's prime suspect. Of course, questioning her would be too easy, so instead he bugs her phone, parks outside her apartment every night and waits for something to happen.
Since there is a wild man on the loose, a guy whose underage daughter was in one of the porno films made in Walsh's warehouse, something does happen, of course.
"Defenseless" manages to build tension here and there, and there's a harrowing scene involving a broken elevator late in the film, but Hershey's character is so Looney Tunes and so many small details here are so bizarre that at times the film looks like a "Naked Gun"-style parody of itself.
Consider the odd little eccentricities so thickly applied to T.K.: She's an incredible slob, she talks to herself in lengthy monologues, every time someone knocks at her door she's just come out of the shower, when she has to question a young woman she takes her to the beach (bringing with her an extra bathing suit, of course).
And every time the ever-present stalking slasher comes into view, he's shown in closeups of the keys on his belt, just like Peter Coyote in "E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial."
"Defenseless" is rated R for violence, sex, nudity and profanity.