Juror #2 (2024)

Score: 3.5 / 5

With the press indicating it might be his final film, 94-year-old Clint Eastwood churns out another feature in Juror #2. His work as both actor and director has hit notable high and low points, and his directorial work has gotten increasingly and obnoxiously tainted by his political messaging, but Eastwood is still a prolific and skilled proficient. Known for his efficiency behind the camera, Eastwood here tackles a convoluted and compelling courtroom drama as if it were a thriller. If you know me, you know I love a courtroom drama: by nature, their writing has to be brilliant. While screenwriter Jonathan Abrams is not a name I'm familiar with, his work in this particular mystery is admirable, perhaps most because it's not, strictly speaking, a mystery at all.

In Savannah, Georgia -- setting to one of Eastwood's most tonally unique films, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil -- at a time that seems to be close to the present day, journalist and recovering alcoholic Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is summoned and selected for jury duty. Though he does not wish to leave his at-risk wife home alone during her third trimester, duty calls, and he seems hell-bent on fulfilling it. The case: a year prior, Kendall Carter and her boyfriend James Sythe had a fight at a bar on the outskirts of town and was subsequently found dead under a nearby bridge. As opening statements wrap up, Kemp is struck with the horrific realization that he was at that bar the night of the fight. Distressed by his wife's stillborn twins, he went to that bar to mull things over over a glass of whiskey; he remembers not drinking and fleeing the bar in shame and regret, pulling out in the rain, and driving away before hitting something that vanished. Was it a deer? Or is he, juror number two, actually guilty for Carter's death?

It's a shocking revelation, all the more so because it happens so early in the film. Tension immediately ratchets as we watch Kemp decide how and if he might recuse himself, how to get his own legal counsel (from his AA sponsor and lawyer, played by Kiefer Sutherland, who urges him to keep quiet and do nothing). Sythe's public defender (Chris Messina) squares off with the county prosecutor running for DA (Toni Collete with, frankly, a gobsmackingly evocative if cartoonish accent) and the case proceeds through typically frenetic, peripatetic hoops of evidence and testimony. Finally, the jury is sequestered in deliberation, and they unanimously vote to convict Sythe.

Well, almost. Kemp is the holdout, and he attempts to Henry Fonda the shit out of his fellow jurors. It's compelling due to his tenuous culpability, and his efforts get frighteningly close to Jean Valjean's self-torment at the possibility of having another man pay for his crimes. He seems always on the verge of breaking, but then he'll do something desperate or stupid to cover his own ass, as when an ex-detective juror (JK Simmons) begins searching for his own evidence that would lead to Kemp and so Kemp leaks this illegality to their bailiff. Kemp grows distant from his wife (Zoey Deutch), who grows suspicious, especially after the prosecutor starts snooping around.

I won't spoil anything else, because courtroom dramas hinge on being compelling on their own unfolding of events, except to say that this film has a lot of annoying improbabilities. It's not a strictly realistic film, which did distract me more than usual. Too many convenient and unlikely coincidences make it all a bit untenable, especially for a story that requires narrative empathy to function, and its central conceit (that a sober and sane man could kill someone, have no realization of it, and then completely forget about it until it all flashes back to him a year later) strains credulity to its breaking point. And by its climax, Kemp's characterization surprisingly and unsatisfyingly flips without insight or justification from the screenplay or performances.

But this is an old-fashioned film with pleasures in store for anyone willing to bypass such shortcomings. It's the kind of mainstream feel-good procedural that pops up once in a while, with precedents from To Kill a Mockingbird to Where the Crawdads Sing, from The Verdict to any John Grisham adaptations from the '80s or '90s. Its middling budget -- all the money going to a wide cast of stars -- helps ground the film, and its unwieldy story develops a momentum of its own purely as a result of its integrity and determination. It's okay to have a straightforward genre flick that doesn't necessary do much in terms of novelty, seeks pure entertainment value, and encourages its audience to thoughtfully reflect and speculate. "What would you do in this situation?" Even trite questions like that can launch stimulating post-screening conversations with material this rich. And, whatever you think of Eastwood's layered criticisms of government, police and prosecutorial misconduct, personal liberties for rogue anarchy, and the judicial system in general, the denouement of Juror #2 will leave you breathless. So be sure to see it with other people, and plan to chat for a while afterwards. Eastwood is more transparent than usual, which makes this moral mess a doozy to try and concisely stake any claims in; it's a welcome change of tone from his overtly libertarian efforts of late.