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.
Directed by: Clint Eastwood
Starring: Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, J.K. Simmons, Chris Messina, Gabriel Basso, Zoey Deutch, Cedric Yarbrough, Leslie Bibb, Kiefer Sutherland
