"Juror #2" Review

 It's a new year, but tonight's first movie of the new year is a throwback to a time when mature filmmakers made well-acted, small-scale tales which didn't involve the fate of the Universe as much as the fate of a few people's souls and moral compasses. Such as it is with Juror #2, a film unfairly burdened with historical importance due to it possibly being the last film by 94-year-old Clint Eastwood.

The titular juror is Justin (Nicholas Hoult), a writer in Georgia who has been called for jury duty in late-October 2022. He tries to beg off because his wife, Allison (Zoey Deutch), is nearly due with a high-risk pregnancy, but is denied and made to sit for the trial of James Sythe (Gabriel Basso, who played incoming Vice President JD Vance in the film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy) who is accused of murdering his girlfriend, Kendall (Francesca Eastwood, one guess as to who dad is), and throwing her body into a creek.

Immediately as the trial begins, Justin realizes that the night of alleged murder and location of her body coincided with the night he thought he had hit a deer on that dark and stormy night. He realizes he was at the bar the couple were at where they'd publicly spatted. Did he hit Kendall?

Justin goes to his AA sponsor, Larry (Kiefer Sutherland), and pays him a dollar (for attorney-client confidentiality) for advice for what to do about his situation and possible involvement. Larry points out that with his record of drunk driving and presence in a bar before the accident, no one will believe he wasn't drunk even though Justin swears he didn't drink the drink he'd ordered. To come forward to save an innocent man with a troubled past would likely destroy his family.

When the trial goes into deliberations, Justin is horrified that everyone just wants to convict James and get back to their lives. They aren't happy with this holdout and his vague comments about needing to look at the evidence, but soon he has an ally in former homicide detective, Harold (J.K. Simmons), who initially believes James should've taken the plea, but begins to agree that something seems off about the case and James doesn't seem like the killer type.

When Harold's attempt to investigate things puts him afoul of the rules, he is dismissed from the jury, but approaches the assistant DA conducting the trial, Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette), and puts the bug in her ear that perhaps the case wasn't properly investigated by the police who had immediately set their sights on the victim's boyfriend and built the case around nailing him to the exclusion of other possibilities.

Where Juror #2 steps up is in the above-average script by first-time screenwriter Jonathan A. Abrams which takes the time to set up the characters to give them understandable, if sometimes unreasonable, motivations. Eastwood's spare direction also relies on viewers to notice crucial details with minimal reiteration like what the date in question meant which would trigger Justin to have a crisis of sobriety.

Abrams script also avoid the lazy tropes of too many movies. Killebrew is running for District Attorney and to win a conviction in this notorious trial would definitely help her, but she's not railroading a man who knows she's innocent. After Harold suggests the investigation may've been myopic, she actually does the work of running down the angle Harold dug up.

The 12 Annoyed Diverse Jurors are eventually willing to consider the thinness of the circumstantial evidence though one juror (Cedric Yarbrough) has an axe to grind against past behavior of the defendant that he'll never change his vote. Another (Chikako Fukuyama) notices a detail that really should've been caught by both the medical examiner and the public defender, Resnick (Chris Messina), so when the verdict is abruptly rendered, we're left wondering what had changed.

Which leads to the least satisfying and sketchiest part, the film's coda where Justin and Killebrew have an oblique conversation where they convey they know what actually happened, but he tells her to deliver actual justice would be too devastating to them. This seems out of character with what he'd tried to do during deliberations, though the final moment may imply both are about to reverse course. It feels like Abrams didn't quite know how to explicate things better and just called it close enough for government work.

Eastwood, for all his notable films in a directorial career spanning over 50 years back to 1971's Play Misty For Me, has never really been a flashy director, focusing more on straightforward storytelling without visual flourishes, and he doesn't start cribbing from Michael Bay here. But across the board the performances are solid, even with tertiary roles. (As an actor, he knows how to direct actors and famously doesn't like to shoot a lot of takes, unlike those like David Fincher who will shoot 100 takes as if anyone would know the difference if he stopped after 50.)

The controversy over Juror #2 is whether a legendary director like Eastwood's potential final film should've been dumped to streaming and denied a theatrical release, but it was always intended to be a Max Original. Frankly, how much of an audience for a quiet legal drama is going to want to schlep to the theater to see a movie like this regardless of quality? Maybe in 1998 we would've, but now any movies that don't beg for BIG SCREEN VIEWING beyond what our nice home theater delivers get caught when they're streaming. We would never have gone out now to see Juror #2, but definitely would've watched it later. So should you.

Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming. (Currently on MAX.)