There Goes Juror #2

Most Americans will have to wait until next month to see Juror #2 on Max, but in the meantime, as Matt Zoller Seitz points out at RogerEbert.com, it’s “playing on 458 screens in France, where it opened at number one at the box office.” Critics are incensed.

As Max Borg explains at Crooked Marquee, Eastwood and Warner Bros. had a long and mutually beneficial relationship before David Zaslav arrived as WBD’s new CEO in 2022 and upbraided his underlings for green-lighting Eastwood’s Cry Macho (2021). Zaslav has ticked off many in the industry as well as more than a few movie lovers by burying such promising projects as Coyote vs. Acme, directed by Dave Green and written by Samy Burch (May December), and anyone who enjoys seeing Zaslav royally roasted is advised to turn to Sean Burns’s review of Juror #2 at North Shore Movies and Adam Nayman’s for the Ringer.

Kino Lorber has just released a new special edition of Eastwood’s directorial debut, Play Misty for Me (1971), on Blu-ray, and “to watch it fifty-three years after its release is to recognize how fully realized Clint’s talent was right out of the gate,” writes Jim Hemphill at IndieWire. As for Juror #2, “Eastwood has created a film as clean and fast as one of his 1990s programmers (Absolute Power, True Crime) but as wrenching in its internal tensions as masterpieces like Unforgiven and Mystic River.”

“Hitchcock would have given his right arm to get his hands on Jonathan Abrams’s screenplay,” imagines Gavin Smith at Reverse Shot. Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is a journalist and recovering alcoholic serving on the jury as James Michael Sythe (Gabriel Basso) is tried for the murder of his girlfriend (Francesca Eastwood, Clint’s daughter). As the prosecutor (Toni Colette) and the public defender (Chris Messina) lay out the facts of the case, Justin realizes that he may have been unintentionally responsible for the death of the young woman.

Justin’s lawyer and AA counselor (Kiefer Sutherland) tells him that if he confesses, he’ll be locked away for decades. It doesn’t matter that he’d resisted the temptation to fall off the wagon the night he hit something on the road that night. No one would believe that he was sober. Somehow, Justin has to convince his fellow jury members that Sythe is innocent while deflecting any suspicion that he knows anything more about the case that what’s been said in the courtroom. And at least one juror, a retired cop (J. K. Simmons), has his doubts.

“What’s fun about the movie is that it’s like 12 Angry Men if Henry Fonda was the killer,” writes Sean Burns. “It’s all executed with the slightly stodgy finesse that’s been the Eastwood brand for as long as I’ve been going to the movies. Juror #2 was obviously shot on a budget, with sets that look like they went up yesterday, but it’s got the kind of clean, clear storytelling beats that have become a lost art in contemporary Hollywood.”

For Adam Nayman, the “premise is pulpy enough for an airport paperback and philosophically sophisticated enough for a treatise; at the risk of being glib about a movie that’s dead serious about the failings of individuals and institutions alike, Juror #2 plays as an amalgam of John Grisham and Robert Bresson, and works like gangbusters on those terms.”

“While many of the ninety-four-year-old director’s more recent films have felt creaky and thrown together,” writes Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at the A.V. Club, “Juror #2 is unassumingly involving, moving confidently and cleanly through what is basically a psychological story by focusing squarely on the characters.” Writing for Paste, Jesse Hassenger finds that “whether by a well-constructed screenplay, Eastwood’s direction, or the simple accident of chemistry, everyone here clicks into place, from veterans like Simmons and Collette to comic actor Cedric Yarbrough in an entirely serious role, to lesser-known figures like Chikako Fukuyama who ably fill out the jury room. But it’s Hoult’s movie, and the actor deepens his persona of late—the boyish ‘nice guy’ who’s more of an entitled little weirdo that he wants to let on.”

Juror #2 “suggests there is still purpose in institutions,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri, “but in some ways it’s the most damning of legal thrillers—one that suggests miscarriages of justice happen not from evil figures pulling strings behind the scenes, but from ordinary people making ordinary mistakes because life gets in the way. And yes, there is perhaps some irony in the fact that the man who was once Dirty Harry has now made a movie about the perils of rushing to judgment.”