Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Clint Eastwood
Starring: Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, J.K. Simmons, Chris Messina, Gabriel Basso, Zoey Deutch,
Cedric Yarbrough, Leslie Bibb, Kiefer Sutherland
For a brief period in the '90s, legal thrillers were all the rage. They
were as ubiquitous as superhero movies in the 2010s and they attracted
top-tier filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman and Alan J.
Pakula. Then Hollywood ran out of John Grisham novels to adapt and turned to
comic books instead. Juror #2, sadly rumoured to be Clint Eastwood's final film (he is 95, after
all), somewhat fittingly arrives at a time when audiences seem to have
finally tired of watching men in tights punch one another. It's a throwback
to those '90s thrillers, complete with obligatory Southern setting, and a
reminder that while those films were no less hokey in their own way than a
Batman movie, they were a fun time made for adults and a dream for the
actors involved.
Juror #2 has a setup Grisham would kill to have devised. It's
essentially a reworking of 12 Angry Men, if the Henry Fonda character's motivation for swaying his fellow jurors
into a Not Guilty vote was due to his knowledge that the accused is
innocent, because he is the guilty party himself.
Called to jury duty on a trail he knows nothing about, Justin (Nicholas Hoult) tries to get himself excused, as his wife (Zoey Deutch) is set to
go into labour any day now. The judge is having none of it; in fact she
claims Justin's not wanting to be there makes him the ideal impartial jury
member. The trial is centred on James Sythe (Gabriel Basso), accused
of killing his girlfriend, Kendall (Francesca Eastwood), following an
argument at a roadhouse (named "Rowdy's", presumably after Eastwood's
Rawhide character). Kendall's corpse was found the following
morning at the bottom of a ravine. These details suddenly cast Justin's mind
back to an incident a year earlier in which he thought he hit a deer with
his car at the very same spot where Kendall was found and on the very same
night.
The tension of Juror #2 comes from Justin's attempts to do
the right thing while covering his own ass. His conscience won't allow him
to let an innocent man be put away for likely the rest of his life, but he
knows his history of alcoholism will see himself imprisoned if he comes
forward with the truth. Setting his sights on clearing Sythe, Justin goes
full Henry Fonda and attempts to sway the other 11 jurors into a Not Guilty
vote. In doing so he only digs himself in deeper as some of the jurors,
including ex-cop Harold (JK Simmons), seize on the theory that
Kendall may have been a victim of a hit and run. Even the prosecuting
District Attorney (Toni Collette) begins to have doubts regarding
Sythe's guilt.
Such external tension is less interesting than the internal tension of
Justin's conscience, which the film never quite explores as profoundly as
you might like. Juror #2 often plays like a Paul Schrader
movie, but Schrader would have latched onto his protagonist's inner turmoil
in a way Eastwood doesn't seem particularly interested in. Of more interest
to Eastwood is the wider issue of man vs state, and who should be the
ultimate arbiter of justice. It's a theme he's been drawn to throughout his
career as both an actor and director, and here he interrogates the question
of whether it's worth sacrificing a "bad" man (Sythe may not be a murderer
but it's suspected he regularly beat Kendall) to protect a "good" man. It's
telling that Justin consults a lawyer (Kiefer Sutherland) rather than
a priest for guidance. Juror #2 is more concerned with
fashioning a thriller from the practical notion of attempting to save your
skin rather than the philosophical notion of saving your soul. It's a very
Catholic movie made by a lapsed Protestant, and Hoult feels miscast in the
sort of role you could imagine Harvey Keitel or Tony Lo Bianco nailing in
their younger days, but sadly America just doesn't produce those sort of
actors today. There's a better version of this movie that gets instantly
added to the Vatican Film List.
Eastwood may waste the opportunity to create a modern transcendental
classic, but he has fashioned a highly entertaining thriller. The
storytelling is zippy and economical, with the trial cleverly dispensed with
in a series of montages that crosscut between the words of the prosecutor
and the defence (Chris Messina). Jonathan Abrams' script
keeps coming up with fresh twists that tighten the invisible noose around
Justin's neck. The cast embraces the opportunity to engage in classic sweaty
Southern courtroom schtick, without ever coming across as hammy. Eastwood
can do this sort of thing in his sleep (and given his age, he probably did),
but there's an energy to Juror #2 that feels like the work of
a much younger filmmaker. If it is to be Eastwood's final film, he's not
going out with a classic, but he's presented us with enough evidence through
his career for this jury of one to find him guilty of being one of the
greats.
Juror #2 is on UK/ROI VOD now.
