The problem with Clint Eastwood‘s Juror No. 2, which I re-watched today after catching it last November, is that Nicholas Hoult‘s story can’t resolve itself in a way that feels fair or just.
It plays with you and keeps you guessing while boxing you in, but it’s deliberately meant to end “badly”, which is to say in a way that leaves you thinking “this isn’t right….I don’t like this…why did Hoult’s character, a decent guy, have to suffer so for an accident?”
If you ask me the Rotten Tomatoes critics overpraised it. They respected the story tension (as I did), but sidestepped the fact that the film is written in such a way that it can’t possibly resolve itself in a generally satisfying fashion.
Posted on 11.5.24: Clint Eastwood‘s Juror No. 2 is a smart, somber, adult-angled jury deliberation drama that holds you start to finish. Alas, it leaves you with an unsatisfied feeling at the very end.
It’s about a reasonable, sensible 30something dude (Nicholas Hoult‘s Justin Kemp, a married, ex-alcoholic magazine writer) trying to wriggle his way out of a tough moral-pressure-cooker situation.
There’s no good way out of what Kemp is facing, and yet we, the audience, would like to see this obviously decent protagonist find a solution regardless.
Serving as a juror on a murder trial, Kemp is devastated early on by a two-fold realization — i.e., the guy accused of killing his girlfriend (Gabriel Basso‘s James Michael Sythe) is not guilty, and that Kemp, of all the forehead-slapping coincidences, is accidentally guilty of having hit this woman with his car on a dark rainy night.
Kemp initially thinks he might have hit a deer, but he’s also not sure. He’s actually suppressing a terrible inkling. His car was damaged by the impact but he had the dent fixed and then he lied to his pregnant wife about where the collision happened.
So the film is basically held together by Kemp’s moral discomfort as well as our own.
How to solve this horrific situation? Kemp tries the Henry Fonda-in-12 Angry Men solution by trying to talk his fellow jurors out of finding a guilty verdict due to reasonable doubt. A hung jury won’t suffice as the case will just be retried.
Juror No. 2 lacks the tension and intrigue of 12 Angry Men, but it never bores and it certainly ends boldly. That’s all I’m going to say.
Our natural inclination is to want to see justice done, which in this case means Kemp has to come clean and face the music. But an attorney friend (Kiefer Sutherland) tells Kemp that because of his prior alcoholism no one will believe he was sober at the time of the accident, and that he’ll wind up doing serious time. Excerpt hie wife (Zoey Deutch) is about to give birth so there’s nothing but pain either way.
Without getting into specifics there’s a major plot hole that involves auto-body repair receipts. That’s all I’m going to say but this issue becomes more and more bothersome.