Juror #2

94-year-old cinema legend Clint Eastwood delivers his latest late-career screed against a failed American institution in this solid, old-school legal potboiler with a terrific moral dilemma at its center. The screenplay by Jonathan Abrams is refreshingly original. A young former alcoholic and father-to-be named Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is called for jury duty and hopes to get out of it due to his wife being in the ninth month of a high-risk pregnancy. Justin gets picked to serve on a high-profile murder trial prosecuted by a sharp female attorney running for district attorney named Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette). The man on trial is James Sythe (Gabriel Basso), accused of killing his girlfriend after a public fight they had at a bar on a dark and stormy night. Sythe is a bad dude with a history of domestic violence and gang affiliation, and Killebrew sees convicting him as a way to close the deal on her election. The public defender assigned to the case, Eric Resnick (Chris Messina), claims Sythe is a reformed man innocent of the charges. After only a few minutes into the lawyers' oral arguments, our protagonist realizes he may be the only person in the world in the world who knows who was responsible for the young woman's death. However, as his lawyer friend and AA sponsor (Kiefer Sutherland) explains, the ramifications for him and his family would be devastating if he came forward with what he knows.

I went in expecting something along the lines of a John Grisham movie from the 1990s, but Juror #2 plays more like 12 Angry Men if Henry Fonda had less-than-altruistic motives. Like most Eastwood movies, the principal cast is outstanding, but the supporting players drag the picture down a bit. Hoult, so wild and expressive as the ecstatic War Boy Nux in Mad Max: Fury Road and as Nicolas Cage's put-upon servant Renfield in Renfield, proves he can also play characters with more internalized emotions. Much of what plays out in the movie happens on his silent face as we watch the not-so-nimble gears in his mind working away. Playing his impossibly pretty and goodhearted wife, Allison, Zoey Deutch (daughter of Lea Thompson and Howard Deutch) brings credibility to a role that should come off as a device rather than a character. Clint and Frances Fisher's daughter Francesca Eastwood (the little "speed zoo" girl from True Crime and star of the little-seen better version of Promising Young Woman, M.F.A.) makes the victim of the crime feel like a person rather than a prop. Collette, Messina, and Sutherland are their usual dependable selves, but the real standout in the cast is J. K. Simmons, who plays a former cop on the jury who knows something is amiss with the case. I haven't seen all fifty of the movies Simmons has made since winning his Oscar for Whiplash, but I've seen many of them, and this is the first role since his Oscar-winning turn that not only feels worthy of the man's talents but of an audience's time! (I had just about given up on this guy)

I only wish Eastwood was a tad more selective about his actors further down the call sheet. Not that anyone in the movie gives a bad performance, but they can't bring needed authenticity to some of the heated exchanges in the jury room, which are not exactly Reginald Rose-level dialogue. Like at least two-thirds of the 40 features Eastwood has directed, the screenplay feels like an excellent first draft that would have benefited from one more pass before the cameras rolled—a simple polish nearly any other producer/director would have insisted on.

But why quibble? With one notable exception, Clint is not a filmmaker who delivers perfection. We go to an Eastwood picture to see a solid, well-crafted movie with a compelling story that usually provides some interesting, if not especially deep, food for thought. Juror #2 delivers what most of us who grew up at any point in the prior century have been missing for the past twenty-five years: not a universe, not an event, not a meta experience, not a deconstruction of a genre, not a reboot, not a legacyquel, not a continuation of some other story, not a terrible version of something we loved from another medium, just an honest to good Hollywood movie. What an amazing twist!

(2K-cinema)