Why All the Furor Over ‘Juror #2’?

When we first learned that Warner Brothers was going to deny Clint Eastwood’s ‘Juror #2’ a proper theatrical release, people were having a furor over a juror. Here was a full-length movie from one of our most significant directors, starring reasonably big-name actors. Critics who had seen the movie praised it as a mature adult drama with big themes, precisely the kind of mid-budget serious movie that used to fill out theaters but now ended up in the streaming dump. It was a crime to not allow Juror #2 to get a proper trial in the court of public opinion.

But now that I’ve seen Juror #2 on streaming, I understand that’s exactly where it belongs. If Clint Eastwood has any particular visual style as a director, it’s certainly not apparent in this film, which is unpretentious, but flat. Flashbacks in the rain to the day of a crime, shot from 16 different angles, each of which reveals nothing, don’t count. There are no panoramas, no vistas, just generic courtrooms and living rooms and bars and endless closeups of near-weeping faces.

JUROR #2 ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Clint Eastwood
Written by: Jonathan Abrams
Starring: Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, J.K. Simmons, Zoey Deutsch, Cedric Yarborough, Chris Messina. Kiefer Sutherland
Running time: 114 mins

The script by Jonathan Abrams “builds tension”, to some extent, though the twist becomes obvious early. Nicholas Hoult, one of our least living actors, plays Justin, a limpid-eyed weasel who somehow manages to make a living in 2024 writing regional travel magazine articles. He’s also an alcoholic with four years of sobriety. As someone who’s gone through recovery, I can tell you that’s the equivalent of about a week. But every day sober is a good day. Keep coming back, Justin, it works if you work it.

In any case, Justin somehow finds himself on the jury of a murder trial even though his wife, a schoolteacher played by Zoey Deutsch, is in the ninth month of her second high-risk pregnancy. We learn nothing else about the wife other than that she is pregnant and sometimes is sad because Justin is sad.  At a certain point early on in the trial, Justin figures out that he, in fact, is the murderer, having struck a woman on a country road on a cold, dark night after stopping off at a road house to almost drink a whiskey.

A good movie would have made Justin out to be either a complete sweaty weasel who would do anything to protect himself, or an actual saint caught in a tough situation. As it stands, he’s just kind of a whiny simp who can’t make a decision. He finds himself arguing in a jury room with a mixed-race group of cliches, including Cedric Yarborough as a black man who works at the Boys and Girls Club and wants to convict the accused killer because his brother died in a drug killing once. The 1990s want its storylines back.

The other black character is an obstinate lady bus driver whose personality is “I just want to get back to my kids.” There’s also a fat, nerdy woman obsessed with true crime, a ditsy hot chick who likes shoes, a stoner, a kindly old grandma, and a smart Asian lady who is a third-year medical student. They are types of a type. “You know nothing about me, man,” one of the jurors, a bald white guy, says to Justin during one long deliberation. That’s not his fault, though. The script refused to tell him. Regardless, none of these two-dimension humans are quite able to figure out that the actual murderer is sitting right across from them, sipping his coffee and looking sad.

That is, except, J.K. Simmons, who plays a florist who is actually a retired Chicago police detective. Somehow the court passed over that fact in a jury selection process. J.K. smells a fish, and starts doing some digging on the weekends, but the court finally gets wise to him and boots him off the jury and out of the movie, thereby removing yet another interesting source of drama.

Other than Hoult, Toni Collette gets the most screen time, as a politically ambitious prosecutor determined to put someone behind bars for this murder, which apparently is the key to her winning an election for District Attorney, a campaign she conducts entirely from the steps of the courthouse of the major murder trial she’s winning. Collette is a fine actor, of course, but her character has no nuance, no home life, though she does seem to spend a lot of time drinking in the bar with the public defender, played, in a familiar and effective bit of casting, by Law and Order’s Chris Messina. Collette is also the only character in the movie with a semblance of a Southern accent, which is odd because Juror #2 is set in Savannah, Georgia.

This is a ridiculous plot, ridden with holes, which, in the hands of a pulpier director, could have been a tasty noir as Hoult feels the walls closing in on him. But Eastwood is too prestige-minded and the script isn’t mean or zingy enough. The movie lingers around in the background, an above-average two-hour episode of a network procedural. The “big questions” it brings up don’t really  correspond with objective reality. A Netflix movie like Rebel Ridge brings up bigger and more important questions about how our justice system actually works, but does so in a gritty small-town Georgia setting, telling a sexy, tragic story loaded with violence. Juror #2 is lucky it ended up on streaming. Otherwise, we’d never know it existed.