Juror #2 Doesn't Deserve to Be Buried

Juror #2 is best known as the new movie directed by Clint Eastwood, very likely to be the final film from the 94-year-old legend, which has been summarily buried by its studio, Warner Bros, with no critics screenings or awards push and a release on only a handful of screens. I caught it on a Tuesday afternoon in the one theater in the Philadelphia region where it opened, two days before it’s set to leave. However, Juror #2 should instead be remembered as a strong legal drama, with a crackerjack script, and much more concerned with tough moral choices than this type of picture typically is. It’s Eastwood’s best movie in years.

Juror #2 might be the most realistic movie I’ve ever seen about jury deliberations, and it gets at a truth that’s seldom acknowledged: the temptation by jurors to agree quickly on a verdict so they can get out of there is a much larger factor in the justice system than most are prepared to admit. But it never gets too preachy about that message.

Nicolas Hoult plays Justin Kemp, a recovering alcoholic who’s about to become a father with his wife (Zoey Deutsch) after multiple miscarriages and stillbirths. He’s picked for jury duty and ends up deciding a case in which Kendall Carter (played in flashbacks by Clint’s daughter Francesca) ended up dead by the side of the road after a drunken altercation with her boyfriend James (Gabriel Basso, who played J.D. Vance in the Hillbilly Elegy movie).

James is accused of the murder, and because it involves the death of a pretty white lady, it’s a high-profile case in the movie’s setting of Savannah, so the candidate for district attorney (Toni Collette) tries the case herself. The problem is that Justin has more of a connection to the case than he lets on. The film follows the trial, including some Rashomon-like flashbacks to the night of the crime, before getting into the jury deliberations. Justin tries to sway the jury on behalf of his interest, while still drawing the sympathy of the audience.

I’ve always enjoyed Hoult when he plays over-the-top douchebags, such as on the streaming show The Great and the movie The Menu, but I’m hot-and-cold on him when he plays more earnestly, but he successfully handles this role. Beyond him, Juror #2 is full of fantastic little performances. J.K. Simmons has a turn as a retired cop on the jury who gets the bug to return to his old profession—even as, as one line of dialogue reveals, he stumbles right over the solution to the mystery.

Kiefer Sutherland, who at 57 has aged into the role of a character actor, plays Hoult’s AA sponsor and lawyer, while veteran TV actor Amy Aquino is the impatient judge. Collette—who played Hoult’s mother years ago in About a Boy—successfully deploys a Southern accent as a conflicted lawyer. Her character is named “Faith Killebrew,” likely named after a ballplayer of Clint’s general vintage. The film is subtle about the public defender, played by Chris Messina, being incompetent, but the film’s Wikipedia plot summary—written, I imagine, by a defense lawyer—keeps mentioning it.

Juror #2 is much better than the last film Eastwood shot in Savannah, his misbegotten 1997 adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which was also about a trial but had a radically different style. This isn’t a film that deserves to be buried.