From the 1980s and through the 1990s, we had a Golden Age of legal thrillers, including “Jagged Edge” (1985), “The Accused” (1988), “Presumed Innocent” (1990), “A Few Good Men” (1992), “Philadelphia” (1993), “The Pelican Brief” (1993), “Primal Fear” (1996), “A Time to Kill” (1996), “A Civil Action” (1998), and many others.
Clint Eastwood’s “Juror #2,” set in the present day, is clearly reminiscent of those films — but it introduces a plot twist fairly early in the proceedings that is so ludicrous, it’s almost comical. You’ll also recognize obvious echoes of the infinitely superior “Twelve Angry Men” from 1957, although the title here would have to be “Twelve Jurors Who Either Have a Secret Agenda or Just Want to go Home.”
Nicholas Hoult does solid work as Justin Kemp, whom we’re told is a “regional magazine writer” in Savannah, Georgia (where Eastwood shot “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” in 1997), and is married to a schoolteacher named Ally (Zoey Deutch) who is in the last days of a high-risk pregnancy. When Justin receives a jury summons, he tries to use his wife’s condition to be excused, but no go. He’s assigned to a high-profile murder trial that we’re told will make or break the career of prosecuting attorney Faith (FAITH!) Killebrew (the great Toni Collette, drifting in and out of a molasses-dripping Southern accent), who is running for district attorney, because prosecutors in these types of movies almost always have political ambitions. (Hey, Toni Collette and Nicholas Hoult are reunited 22 years after “About a Boy”!)
Now. About this case that has attracted enormous media attention and will supposedly determine the upcoming election. The unfortunate truth is this wouldn’t be a high-profile trial in real life. It’s the far-too-common story of a low-rent bum named James Sythe (Gabriel Basso) and his tumultuous and abusive relationship with his longtime girlfriend Kendall Carter (played by Francesca Eastwood, Clint’s daughter). One rainy night after James and Kendall get into a nasty fight at a joint called Rowdy’s Hideaway, with James breaking a bottle of beer and becoming increasingly threatening, Kendall storms out and walks home down a dark and winding country road. The next day, a hiker finds Kendall’s body in a creek bed. James is charged with her murder, with Faith as the prosecutor and her former law school classmate Eric Resnick (the always reliable Chris Messina) as the public defender.
SPOILER ALERT, though it’s in the trailer: On the night Kendall died, Justin was also at Rowdy’s Hideaway. He ordered but didn’t consume a drink — he’s been sober for a few years now — and then drove in the rain, hitting something he thought was a deer. But maybe it wasn’t a deer. Maybe it was … Kendall? And now, in the wildest of coincidences, Justin has been selected as a juror for this very trial. (Weirdly enough, even though this is such a publicized case and Kendall’s death occurred on the same night Justin was in the bar, he’s never even heard about this tragedy until he’s in the courtroom. Really?)
Now Justin is faced with a moral dilemma: Does he come forward and risk ruining his life and destroying his family, or orchestrate a guilty verdict or mistrial for Sythe, who might actually be innocent?
“Juror #2” is riddled with unrealistic sequences. Trial witnesses are allowed to give speeches you can only give in movies. When the jurors are allowed to visit the crime scene, they’re instructed not to talk about the details of the case, but they do it anyway. That jury is filled with stock characters, including J.K. Simmons as a retired homicide detective who didn’t disclose that information during voir dire; Cedric Yarborough as the director of the local Boys and Girls Club, who has a personal axe to grind with Sythe and doesn’t care if Sythe is guilty of this particular crime, and Leslie Bibb as a stay-at-home mother who volunteers to be jury foreperson, notes that she has been the foreperson on two previous cases that ended in mistrials, and that if this jury is deadlocked, her husband will get a big kick out of that. Wait, what?
Oh, and there’s Kiefer Sutherland as Justin’s AA sponsor, Larry, who also happens to be an attorney, and yes, there’s a moment when Larry tells Justin to give him a dollar because that means he’s now officially counsel for Justin.
At the age of 94, Clint Eastwood still has the master’s touch for directing a film and for presenting situations with real-world political and legal and social parallels. The actors sink their teeth into the juicy material. There’s never a moment when the story lulls. Alas, it’s all just so … preposterous, due to that mistrial of a screenplay.