Juror #2 (2024)

We can’t say with certainty that Juror #2 will be director Clint Eastwood’s last picture, but he turns 95 this year so it’s not outside the realm of possibility. As a dedicated middlebrow filmmaker, Eastwood—like his spiritual brother Ron Howard, who we first knew in our living rooms as Rowdy Yates and Opie Taylor—makes pictures that make people feel good, with optional additional moral instruction. That’s the long and short of it: Unforgiven, American Sniper, Gran Torino, Sully, Million Dollar Baby, the paired Letters From Iwo Jima and Flags of Our Fathers, etc., etc. Within his wheelhouse Eastwood has turned out to be a pretty good filmmaker—better than Howard. Juror #2 was originally intended as a direct-to-streaming release, which might have been more appropriate given how much it relies on a coincidence that makes any reasonable person howl. Nicholas Hoult (the silvery-lipped Nux in Mad Max: Fury Road and the boy in About a Boy) plays Justin Kemp, a recovering alcoholic whose wife is third-trimester of a high-risk pregnancy after previous miscarriages. He’s called to jury duty on a case where (gasp!) he and not the man on trial turns out to be the wanton vehicular homicider in question. Oh such dilemma. I mean, it’s set in a small town in Georgia, Ocilla, so sure, it’s possible. But it’s so constantly hard to believe. Screenwriter Jonathan A. Abrams is really pushing it here and Eastwood is too for accepting this ridiculous premise as remotely plausible. Toni Collette (The Sixth Sense, Hereditary, also with Hoult in About a Boy) plays it with her usual skill as the prosecutor who bears one of my favorite character names of all time, Faith Killebrew, which puts me in mind of the Minnesota Twins. J.K. Simmons and Kiefer Sutherland pile on with additional star power. Simmons is good in the sour hangdog way he usually is. Sutherland, as a semi-corrupt and somewhat unbelievable AA sponsor, is remarkably bad, reminding us that his usual signal of intensity, hoarse whispering, has been failing him for a while now. Is Juror #2 dramatic and engaging? Sure, I guess so. I mean, I watched the whole thing even while carping to myself about plot points. Eastwood could have picked worse ways to do a swan song, if that’s what this is. But that’s an insight that could well appear in the dictionary definition of “damning with faint praise.”