Most can agree there’s a fair share of cracks cracks to America’s justice system. But what’s responsible for some of those courthouse imperfections? In director Clint Eastwood’s crackling good thriller, “Juror #2,” you can find the culprit by looking into the mirror. As this tense film suggests, the scales of justice are burdened by human flaws — ambitions, special interests and our difficulty in confronting inescapable pasts and presents.
All factor into Eastwood’s engrossing 40th turn in the director’s chair, another feather in the filmmaker’s illustrious cap.
The provocative Grisham-like legal thriller serves filmgoers with convincing evidence not just that justice is an ambiguous system but that the 94-year-old Oscar-winner can still crank out a smart, entertaining thought-provoker. (It’s leagues better than Eastwood’s last feature, “Cry Macho” — except for the star-making turn from the rooster Jet.)
The central conceit of “Juror #2” asks audiences to swallow a lot and suspend disbelief since it’s tied tightly around coincidence. Kick reason to the curb and you’re in for a tense, squirm-worthy experience that sticks in your head for days.
Pivotal in navigating this moral conundrum successfully is selecting a lead actor who you’ll care about. Eastwood gets that and more with his lead, the in-demand, highly versatile Nicholas Hoult (he has three films coming before the year ends). Hoult makes his ethically challenged character, who does some desperate things, not only believable and relatable, but even likable.
His Georgia dad-to-be Justin Kemp becomes the upstart Juror #2, a family man trying to keep his life on the right track but realizes it might all derail when he steps into the jurors box. He learns he might well be the responsible party in the death of the victim, Kendall (Francesca Eastwood). But the person facing a murder rap is her boyfriend (Gabriel Basso), a hot-tempered guy with a rap sheet. The couple argued at a bar where the angst-ridden Justin was staring down his own demons that fateful night.
In court, Justin wrestles with his present as well as his troubled past while worrying about the future with his wife (Zoey Deutch) and their unborn child. Is his life worth saving more than the person who stands accused? That’s one of the film’s biggest and best moral quandaries.
Hoult is the center of the film and never overplays the torment roiling inside. It’s an intuitive performance that requires him to express interior panic to the audience but not to the characters around him. Justin’s quick thinking in court belies a flawed man perhaps better-versed ij covering up past actions he wants to forget.
To that extent, he seeks to assuage his guilt by swaying other jurors from coming up with a guilty verdict. Some won’t budge while juror Harold (J.K. Simmons) violates jury instructions. Meanwhile, the case’s ambitious prosecutor Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette has political aspirations riding on the trial, while the defendant’s attorney Eric Resnick (Chris Messina) tells her this is hardly an open-and-shut case.
Screenwriter Jonathan Abrams — who grew up in the Bay Area — presents Eastwood with juicy material and both do a fine job of keeping us on edge throughout. That said, “Juror #2” does have faults, including utterly wasting Kiefer Sutherland in a role designed to simply further the plot along. Ditto the accused husband who needed to be further fleshed out in the latter part of the film to give the outcome even more authority.
But there’s much to admire about “Juror #2,” from the multi-hued performances by Hoult and Collette to how Eastwood and Abrams so adroitly put us into each character’s shoes and makes us wonder what we would do. Nothing is clear-cut in “Juror #2”, with Eastwood once again navigating, as he did with “Unforgiven,” “Richard Jewell,” “Mystic River” and so on, in which themes of morality, truth, justice and vengeance get far more blurred than what’s on the surface.
While Eastwood’s final directorial feature doesn’t rank amongst the best he’s delivered, it’s still bracingly good and deserves a more expansive release than what it’s receiving. Details: 3 stars out of 4; in select theaters Nov. 1.
Contact Randy Myers at soitsrandy@gmail.com.
‘JUROR #2’
Rating: PG-13
Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, J. K. Simmons, Kiefer Sutherland
Director: Clint Eastwood
Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes
When & where: Opens Nov. 1 in select theaters
