Juror #2

Scott Hardie: “It was ok.”

Wow, what a premise for a movie! The trailers and many reviews are giving away what the audience slowly learns over the course of the first act, so I'm going to state it out in the open here:

A juror in a murder trial realizes that he was the one who killed the victim, accidentally but neglectfully, rather than the defendant being tried.

Will the juror come forward with the truth and face a harsh prison sentence himself, or will he let an innocent bystander be sentenced to prison for his actions? Throw in some complications, like the juror's wife being eight months pregnant with their first child, the defendant being a P.O.S. wife-beater who society would not miss, and the juror being in A.A. and working hard on taking responsibility for his mistakes in life, and you have one hell of a moral dilemma to torture the protagonist.

Unfortunately, it doesn't really go that way for long. I was hoping for a moral drama that ponders a real thicket of right-or-wrong questions, and the movie spends some time there. But fairly quickly, it transitions into a more conventional thriller about a guilty man trying not to get caught. Its driving force changes from "will the juror take responsibility?" to "will other people realize the juror is the killer?" as he tries to conceal his involvement in one situation after another that seems like it will expose him.

That kind of thriller can be done well (Hitchcock would have made a feast out of this material), but late-period Clint Eastwood is a low-energy director who fails to ratchet up the intensity. Juror #2 kind of ambles along, introducing some promising twists and then letting them fizzle out, never quite gaining momentum. The screenplay by Jonathan A. Abrams is full of clever ideas, but the resulting movie doesn't do it justice, not to mention that a talented and eager cast is wasted.

When people complain about disappointing movie remakes, I think part of the problem is that Hollywood keeps remaking movies that were already good the first time and inevitably come across badly as remakes. What Hollywood should remake are movies such as this, where all of the right parts were in place but the movie just didn't quite make use of them. This could have been something really special.This review contains spoilers. Reveal it.

− December 29, 2024 • more by Scott • log in or create an account to reply