Movie Review: Eastwood’s made a creaky court case built around “Juror #2”

Maybe the answer to “Why did Warner Brothers barely release Clint Eastwood’s ‘final film?” was that it’s just not very good.

“Juror # 2” is competently cast, acted, shot and put together. But the script is melodramatic to the point of “hackneyed,” with a couple of unintentional laughs thrown in for good measure. I caught at least one continuity error, and that is about the only thing that really held my attention the rest of the way through this eye-roller of a Clint curtain call.

Others can grade great grandpa on the curve, but about the best you can say about this “Matlock” melodrama is that it’s not “Cry Macho,” even if it’s not any better than that the worst of the “final films” that preceded it.

Nicholas Hoult stars as a recovering alcoholic and expectant father who finds himself on a Savannah murder trial jury in which he has a very important important piece of evidence about the crime which the accused is seemingly certain to have commited.

Juror number two is pretty sure he himself did it.

Seeing as how another juror turns out to be a retired cop, you have to wonder if the “real” killer will get away with it. And you ponder the competence of the prosecuting attorney, running for DA (Toni Collette) and the public defender (Chris Messina) during voir dire (jury questioning and selection).

But that’s kind of the point. Eastwood’s conjured-up a condemnation of America’s justice system, and in his most Clint touch of all, leaves the rush-to-judgement “their only suspect” cops out of the equation altogether. Yeah Clint, prosecutorial misconduct along the Georgia coast always has a local policing element. Or didn’t you hear?

Jurors bicker over a verdict with the two Black jurors (Cedric Yarbrough and Adienne C. Moore) the quickest to vote “guilty” to get out of there and go home. The others, urged on by Justin (Hoult), start teasing-out other possible solutions to the mystery, and break the judge’s strict orders to not attempt their “own investigation.”

The most tained juror of all consults his AA sponsor (Kiefer Sutherland) who conveniently turns out to be another attorney. And the advice that counselor counsels is jaw-dropping, more dramatically convenient than real world ethical.

Coincidences like that abound as our guilty juror flashes back to that fateful night and tries to head off A) sending an innocent man to prison and B) to void letting suspicion fall on him as he attempts that.

Eastwood serves up a politically correct jury — white, Black, Asian, young, old, etc. — passing judgment on a case so convoluted and a screenplay so contorted that even the aspiring DA starts doing her own investigating. Because again, the COPS are left out of this altogether.

The strangers in the jury room leap into instant “old man” and “stoner” insults, this coming after the second or third reference to “this flawed process” and “imperfect it may be” in court. The worst thing anyone calls the DA is “a politician.” That’s the depth of the messaging here.

Further complicating our suspect juror’s attack of conscience and rationalizations about the other suspect being “a bad dude” is his “problem pregnancy” wife (Zoey Deutch) who needs him by her side once he’s saved the innocent man and covered his own tracks from within the jury room.

I was willing to go along with some of this as Eastwood goes through the motions of presenting the jury selection and the trial. He can’t reinvent the genre, so he doesn’t try.

But the picture isn’t playing and there’s little suspense and even less logic you start taking note of the abrupt shifts in the not-quite-caricatured characters and the plot. You hear a juror accuse another of changing his or her tune from what he said “just the other day” on the FIRST day of deliberations.

And you take comfort in Collette, Yarbrough, Simmons, Deutch and Sutherland, the stand-outs from the cast, as you pity those who aren’t as compelling as they might have been were they working for anybody other than “One Take Clint.”

Rating: PG-13, violent images, profanity

Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, Chris Messina,
Cedric Yarbrough, J.K. Simmons, Leslie Bibb, Adrienne C. Moore, Kiefer Sutherland and Zoey Deutch.

Credits: Directed by Clint Eastwood, scripted by Jonathan A. Abrams. A Warner Bros. release.

Running time: 1:54