Though it carries itself lightly, with little in the way of grandiosity, Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2 feels like one of the year’s more pivotal films. Not only is it likely to be the 94 year old Eastwood’s final film, a true end of an era in and of itself, but the reprehensible handling of its release by Warner Bros shows just where the industry is at right now. A high-concept, decently starry legal thriller used to be the grown-up Hollywood mainstream’s bread and butter – now it’s something to be tossed out into the world with only the most minimal of marketing.
It’s a shame that Juror #2 has to shoulder this burden, as it’s otherwise just a perfectly solid courtroom drama, with the instant classic silly-but-thinky premise of ‘what if the real killer was somehow put on the jury of a murder trial?’ This juror, as you might have guessed, is juror number 2, aka Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult), a recovering alcoholic with a heavily pregnant wife and a life he has spent a lot of effort rebuilding. One year prior, sober but in a state of distress and driving at night in a blinding rainstorm, Justin hit something with his car, knocking it off a bridge into the creek below.
He had always believed it to be a deer, but very soon into the trial of accused murderer James Sythe (Gabriel Basso), he realises his actual victim was Sythe’s girlfriend Kendall. As the volatile boyfriend, Sythe is the first and only suspect and so Justin, wracked with guilt but unwilling to actually come clean and throw his own future away, tries to find a way to influence his fellow jurors to acquit Sythe without incriminating himself. It’s, unavoidably, a story that can feel pretty contrived at points, especially whenever Jonathan Abrams’s script goes off on one of its goofier tangents, but it is still entertaining to watch Eastwood and Abrams just keep tightening the screws.
Hoult is great as Justin, very carefully treading the line between sympathetic fuckup and outright weasel as the pressure keeps building. His fellow jurors, with the exception of ex-detective Harold (JK Simmons), are all utterly convinced of Sythe’s guilt, and so hate Justin for seemingly wasting their time with his ‘doubts’, and watching Hoult bounce off 11 angry peers, all well-played by a solid roster of character actors, is compelling fun, albeit a fun that does become repetitive after a while.
On top of its character study, Juror #2 is also fascinated by the American justice system itself – personified here by politically ambitious and absurdly named prosecutor Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette) – and whether an idealised version of justice is possible in a room full of 12 people who mostly just want to be done with the whole as quickly as possible. It’s hardly hitting on novel points, but it is fascinating to see Eastwood still wrestling with the traditional tenets of *America* in his 90s. As a final goodbye to such a storied career, Juror #2 does feel like a quiet note to go out on, but it’s still late-period Eastwood through and through; simple and classical filmmaking used to ask real questions.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 