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Clint Eastwood Returns with Juror #2, His Most Entertaining Movie in Years

By Jesse Hassenger  |  October 31, 2024 | 9:25am
Movies Reviews Clint Eastwood
Clint Eastwood Returns with Juror #2, His Most Entertaining Movie in Years
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For about 20 years, Clint Eastwood has been directing two basic types of movies: Occasional elegiac farewells to his movie-star career, each seeming more like a potential final starring role than the last; and more frequent and experimental explorations of 20th and 21st century history, an American patchwork told in a combination of war, partial biographies, and occasional footnotes. Juror #2, the latest but probably not last project from the 94-year-old auteur, breaks from this pattern. At its core, it’s a noirish legal thriller and morality play that, apart from some of its more ambiguous shadings and observations about the American legal system, could have served as a programmer released during Eastwood’s teenage years. More than any Eastwood movie since Blood Work, it’s working from a real grabber of a hook: Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult), a magazine writer and expectant father, is selected for jury duty, only to realize the accused is being tried for a crime that Justin himself committed.

Justin isn’t a Trap-style serial killer, disguising his evil with regular-guy affability. His affability comes hard-won; he’s an alcoholic in recovery, and in a moment of strife and weakness some time ago, he visited a former haunt and ordered a drink. He ultimately resisted temptation and left the bar without taking a sip, only to hit something in his car on the way home. Unable to find what he hit, and looking straight at a nearby deer-crossing sign, he assumed it must have been an animal that limped away from this scene. As a jury member, he learns that a woman was killed that night, on that road, and her ex-criminal boyfriend James Sythe (Gabriel Basso) is set to take the fall for her murder. As the accidental perpetrator of a hit-and-run, Justin wants to steer the jury away from a wrongful conviction. But confessing directly would likely mean presumption of a DUI (he already has at least one on record) and, as such, years in prison away from his wife Ally (Zoey Deutch) and their impending baby.

This absorbing premise requires soaking up some contrivances along with it: The case is described as make-or-break for prosecutor Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette), capable of throwing off the closing weeks of her election campaign for district attorney; on its own, a local death that could be plausibly ruled an accident taking on this much importance in a criminal trial seems unlikely. Moreover, accepting the idea of intense public scrutiny draws attention to the fact that until Justin actually sees and recognizes Sythe, he has apparently never put it together that this well-publicized death took place exactly where he was on a particularly memorable, harrowing evening.

Or maybe he’s simply in denial. Juror #2 leaves just enough ambiguities in Justin’s backstory that it sometimes appears to be building toward executing some final corkscrew of a twist. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Eastwood and screenwriter Jonathan Abrams play fair throughout, without sparing Justin the wringer. His secret knowledge of Sythe’s innocence throws him into conflict with certain members of the jury, and in surprising sync with other, more pliable peers. At one point, it seems as if J.K. Simmons, playing a jury member with a secret of his own, might take over the movie in a vicarious act of older-guy ship-steering. (It’s easy to picture a movie with his character as the lead, maybe even played by Eastwood himself a few decades ago.) Some lopsidedness would not be unexpected; some of Eastwood’s recent films have suffered a little from larger ensembles where it feels like not every actor finds a rhythm with his unfussy, few-takes efficiency. Juror #2 is no less eclectic in that area, but 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. Rather than scoring cheap satirical points on that tip, the movie performs more serious-minded characterization of Justin as a man whose genuine small-matter decency gets a big-picture test, prodding at whether his advocacy for second chances is purely selfish or manages some accidental moral righteousness. Though it’s fun to see certain screws tighten in its protagonist’s direction, Juror #2 gathers a surprising amount of moral weight behind its well-worn-paperback premise. Rather than exposing mechanical creaks, Eastwood’s more workmanlike qualities behind the camera – this is hardly his most beautiful or delicate project – make this particular film feel alive with the power of … regular grown-up thrillers! It’s no secret that they’ve been in short supply, and that sometimes even an uninspired potboiler can start to look attractive by its very absence from multiplexes. Yet Juror #2 isn’t coasting on slick nostalgia either, either. If anything, it plays on our desire for a courtroom thriller with the confidence to set things right, casting noirish shadows upon its subjects. Eastwood, still so earnestly attuned to the mechanics of personal guilt and faltering systems, finds timelessness in that growing unease.

Director: Clint Eastwood
Writer: Jonathan Abrams
Starring: Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, J.K. Simmons, Chris Messina, Cedric Yarbrough, Zoey Deutch
Release date: November 1, 2024

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.

 
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