25 Years Ago, Double Jeopardy Held a Going-Out-of-Business Sale for ’90s Thrillers

In September 1999, a surprise hit played throughout the fall to become one of the year’s most popular movies – a film that also exposed the fissures and tensions beneath a modern marriage, caused in part by materialism and pressure to succeed, and inevitably ending in violence. I’m speaking, naturally, of Double Jeopardy, the movie where Ashley Judd’s husband fakes his death and frames her for his murder – freeing her up to eventually kill him, because she can’t be convicted for the same crime twice. The movie has no direct source material, but I do picture screenwriters David Weisberg and Douglas Cook pointing to their heads like Roll Safe when they came up with the idea.

And yes, American Beauty did ultimately wind up making a little more money in the long run, and won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, with its own portrait of a fractured marriage. But that movie’s strange position in the 1999 pantheon – a galvanizing and then-contemporary consensus choice for the best movie of the year that has soured quicker and more noticeably than other zeitgeisty offerings – has probably been talked to death. Double Jeopardy has been content to play on TNT for much of the 2000s. It made almost exactly the same amount of money as Notting Hill, a date-night attraction for the chillier fall season.

Double Jeopardy doesn’t seem like a particularly 1999 movie on its face. It seems more like the kind of movie ascribed to a vague era – say, 1996-2003; the Ashley Judd period – than a particular year. September ’99 had a bunch of those; as American Beauty prepped audiences for a fourth quarter full of pre-millennial ennui and, in certain cases, major films from talent both established and new, multiplexes were a lot more anonymous, with Double Jeopardy, Blue Streak, Stigmata, and For Love of the Game teaming up to prompt the question: Wait, what year is this?

There’s something satisfying about that group of movies now, in theory if not always individually, simply because they represent a relative variety of genres, stars and concepts, and Double Jeopardy is particularly well-positioned for this kind of nostalgia: the kind of potboiler thriller for adults that feels nearly extinct in contemporary movie theaters. As it happens, the most pre-millennial aspect of Double Jeopardy is how, 25 years later, it feels like such a catch-all stew of its ’90s influences. Most prominently, it’s a distaff knockoff of The Fugitive, with Ashley Judd wrongly convicted of murdering her spouse and Tommy Lee Jones, as her parole officer, in hot pursuit once she decides to go rogue and find the real bad guy. The not-quite-twist – it would be obvious from the start even if it wasn’t the trailer-advertised gimmick – is that her spouse (Bruce Greenwood) is the bad guy, having framed her to escape a sticky financial situation and abscond with his mistress (Annabeth Gish) and the young son who Judd’s character is so desperate to see again.

But as a chase movie, Double Jeopardy is clumsy and messy, a stark contrast to the sleekness of The Fugitive (or even, really, U.S. Marshals, the far more generic chase thriller semi-sequel starring Jones’ Sam Gerard character). That could be chalked up to director Bruce Beresford having more affinity for character-based dramas like Tender Mercies and Driving Miss Daisy than pulse-pounding suspense, but it’s also on the movie’s haphazard ingredients; for five or ten minutes at a time, it resembles domestic drama; noir; noir’s late-20th century counterpart, the erotic thriller; courtroom drama; mystery; and revenge flick. The latter depends on the gimmick introduced about halfway through – a fellow prison inmate tells Judd that if she does get out of prison, she’ll be free to kill her actually-alive husband with impunity because of the double jeopardy law. But despite that swell marketing hook, the movie never really leans into it; Judd only feints toward the idea of re-killing her husband, and Jones never seems to truly believe that she’ll do it. It’s more of a whimsical notion that gets our heroine to focus up on bulking up (which she does for a few minutes of montage, only to barely use any of her newfound physical strength) and tracking down her husband and, more importantly, her son of indeterminate age.

Because, yes, even though the kid in question initially wavers somewhere between the ages of 3 and 6, Double Jeopardy is really more of an I-want-my-kid-back thriller, something that Judd seemingly convinced every actress in Hollywood to try out in the following decade. Even within that realm, it doesn’t feature the most strenuous of fierce-mom emoting; Judd can and does often play tough, but she’s not typically possessed by a righteous rage. Her performance is, by default, the most interesting thing in the movie, not because it particularly capitalizes on acclaimed work like Ruby in Paradise, but because it became her biggest movie-star moment, making a surprisingly decent approximation of Harrison Ford.

That’s also the most time-capsule element of Double Jeopardy, the kind of movie that otherwise should be, as mentioned, difficult to pin to a specific year. In its mixing together of countless standby subgenres from the preceding 20 years of studio filmmaking, it feels a bit like the movie is preparing for some kind of shift, uncertain of what it will be. Do audiences want to see a woman in the Harrison Ford role? Righteous, avenging violence? A chase thriller with a bit more action? Good old-fashioned sexual intrigue? For its season’s biggest-grossing crowdpleaser – with the slower start of American Beauty, there was nothing bigger until new James Bond and Toy Story movies arrived in November – the movie is surprisingly halting and uneven, an agreeable time-passer rather than crackerjack entertainment.

Today, Double Jeopardy plays almost like a going-out-of-business sale on the courtroom/crime/erotic thriller ’90s – everything must go! Judd would remain a star after this movie, but only exceed its grosses on a technicality, as a supporting player in some Divergent movies. Tommy Lee Jones, too, would mostly post bigger numbers in franchise fare: Marvel, Bourne, Men in Black sequels. (Rules of Engagement, a far less lady-friendly movie with Jones and Samuel L. Jackson, would make half as much as Double Jeopardy and still stand as the biggest-grossing movie of this type in the following year 2000.) It wasn’t necessarily clear at the time, but maybe the movie truly needed its dubious legal loophole to break through. Subsequent thrillers could no longer hope to spring the same trick twice.

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on Twitter under the handle @rockmarooned.