2024 | PG-13 | starring Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, J.K. Simmons, Zoey Deutch, Leslie Bibb, Cedric Yarbrough, Chris Messina | directed by Clint Eastwood | 1h 54m | 3 out of 5 stars |
Rumored to be the final film for 94-year-old Clint Eastwood, whose directing career has almost eclipsed his acting career with taught, measured modern day classics, Juror # 2 is a worthy addition to Eastwood’s filmography. It’s a solid, true-to-form understated and interesting legal centered around a compelling hook.
Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is a husband with a baby on the way when he is called for an average day of jury duty. Once the trail commences, he realizes that he has an involvement in the crime in question and that the prosecutor’s (Toni Collette) case isn’t the correct interpretation of the evidence. Kemp works against a hostile and nearly unanimous jury to keep an innocent man from going to prison for murder while not exposing himself.
Crackerjack premise, right? I’m actually surprised this clever twist on the legal courtroom drama hasn’t been done before. A juror finds himself deciding the fate at center of a crime he, himself, was involved in, but has so far gotten away with. It’s a little bit 12 Angry Men, a little bit Elevator to the Gallows. At the center of the film is Hoult, having a heck of a last 2 years, working on a passable American accent and playing it as straight as he ever has. Eastwood has filled the film with a roster of talent first in the courtroom with Collette as the prosecutor and Chris Messina as the public defender and then in the jury room with Leslie Bibb claiming the foreman spot and the likes of Cedric Yarbrough pushing for a guilty verdict and J.K. Simmons – terrific as a low-key ex-cop who starts to believe in the defendant’s innocence.
The jury scenes are as frustrating as they are probably accurate. Everyone comes in with their biases and just wants to go home. Juror #2 hits on a lot of issues with the justice system. The kind of stuff you’d hear about every day on some NPR podcast. The prosecutors over-charging, the jury system that picks from a pool of random people who don’t want to be there, the prosecution that singles in on a suspect and stops investigating. It’s all handled with Eastwood’s trademark steady hand and procedural elegance. It works, all the way through and the premise is so interesting that the movie would have worked in either direction that Kemp would have decided to go.
At the same time, that’s all it is. Unlike Eastwood’s best films Juror #2 doesn’t open up that premise to explore a bigger theme. It’s not the anti-western of Unforgiven, the right-to-die debate of Million Dollar Baby, the unprecedented POV flip of Letters from Iwo Jima or the police conspiracy of Changeling. It’s good. In the way that solid material, a solid director and good actors come together to make something good.
One interesting thing I will note, kind of a side-note, but still. People always downplay the “wife” role in these movies. Zoey Deutch gets some screentime here as Kemp’s pregnant wife, who then has his baby during the course of the trial. This character doesn’t just play into Kemp’s decisions on the jury but the audience’s perception of him. While the women of RogerEbert.com are waxing on and on about the sexist, boxed in, stereotyped, male gazed-at role of women in horror movies, let’s take a minute to talk about how this movie is fighting against the Disposable Male trope. Without a wife and child at home, this movie and our reaction to Kemp’s scenario becomes much different. If he’s a single guy that works, plays Playstation and hangs out with the guys on the weekend, that’s a character that leans the audience into rooting for him to sacrifice himself for justice. It is only because of the existence of his wife and newborn baby that the central conflict exists at all. It’s an example of how a single role may be small in terms of screen time, but absolutely critical to keeping the story held together and guided in the direction the director wants to take the audience.