Juror #2 (2024)

Two days in a row for legal thrillers on the blog. I could have planned things a bit better, but what the hell . . . my blog, my rules.

Written by Jonathan Abrams and directed by Clint Eastwood, Juror #2 is very entertaining for most of the 114-minute runtime. You have to work hard to keep suspending your disbelief though, especially when it comes to some of the moments engineered to specifically ratchet up the tension.

Nicholas Hoult plays Justin Kemp, the juror of the title. He's being asked to decide the guilt or innocence of a man (James, played by Gabriel Basso) accused of murdering his partner (Kendall, played by Francesca Eastwood) after a drunken argument witnessed by many people. What those people didn't witness was Justin also in that bar, looking at a drink that he was tempted by, before he drove home, hitting "something" in the road on the way. Justin thinks he can maybe convince the rest of the jury that James is innocent, but that will have people looking harder for someone to arrest for the crime. It's not just a criminal case. It's a political hot potato for Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette), who wants to prosecute this case successfully before bagging a DA role.

It's easy to see why this screenplay would appeal to Eastwood and his cast. Every minute of the runtime seems to see the stakes and drama increase, and the leads barely get to catch their breath as they get swept up by the tide taking them towards a finale that should, at the very least, prompt a bit of conversation between people about what they would or wouldn't have done in Hoult's situation.

Hoult is a big plus for the film, and he's good enough to get through even the more ridiculous sequences without embarrassing himself too much. The same can be said of the other main cast members, but it's Hoult stuck with the worst plot points to work around. Collette and Chris Messina do the usual movie lawyer schtick, playing the prosecuting attorney and defence attorney, respectively. Basso has to spend a lot of the movie trying not to be too expressive, J. K. Simmons is good fun as an ex-cop on the jury who starts to smell a rat, and Zoey Deutch, Leslie Bibb, and Kiefer Sutherland get to make very little impact.

I'm not going to say that I didn't enjoy some of Juror #2, but I cannot recall the last time I watched something with such a strong premise go downhill so quickly. What I hoped was going to be a knotty and thought-provoking riff on 12 Angry Men turns into something so laughable and contrived that it's impossible to keep caring for the main character for the entire runtime. 

If you can watch this without thinking about the absurd lack of logic then you may end up enjoying it, and I'm sure many can be carried through it all by the leads. Abrams and Eastwood make things very difficult though, the former not doing good enough with the writing and the latter not adding anything to distract from it. It may not be criminally bad, but it's not very good.

5/10

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