Clint Eastwood's JUROR # 2 (2024)

 (Clint voice growling in to the theater) "Hey, you punks, this ain't a sequel to that Demi Moore/Alec Baldwin programmer; I got my own Juror moral ambiguity cooking, damn it! get off my lawn!" (Or maybe that's just my oddball fantasy going on this site...)

Anyway, wow, what a way to start off "Noirvember" with a film that could have been made any time in the last 80 years... and that's a good thing to be when done right, and Eastwood does it and then some here!

Juror # 2 comes in with a solid pitch that should get anyone with a pulse interested at a studio - and if you have to put it at a movie-comparison level of classic Hollywood, think 12 Angry Men, only instead of Henry Fonda trying to sway a jury but he... woops, probably did actually really kill the person the accused is on trial for - and Eastwood has a script that hits not only the morally and even existentially ambiguous notes that would be music to his craggly ears (for his lead, Nicholas Hoult, and the supporting Prosecutor lawter played by Toni Collette), he still has it to cast his movie and know how to just... tell the darn story and get on with the thing.

There's this satisfaction with a well-told, nuts and bolts *story* in the current world of cinema that some (though certainly not all) might take for granted with all the giant pomp and circumstance of blockbusters and even the more grisly genre offerings in cineplexes (and I'm not above loving the big and bombastic as well as the weird and off putting, see my diary log for more on that just this week/yesterday even); Eastwood is not the proverbial Last Man Standing when it comes to telling a story, but he appears to be in what is likely his last time out showing that the old adage from Raoul Walsh holds firm: if you haven't got a story, you haven't got anything.

Juror #2 takes just enough time that it needs to tell what it needs to and, with perhaps one major exception, there arent missteps in what Eastwood and his writer are going for with what this man on this jury and his Great Big Dilemma is on about. As I'm praising the compelling traditional craftsmanship, not to mention how it's just so much fun to see the stars like Hoult and Collette and JK Simmons and Zoe Deutsch, plus a convincing James Basso as the perp who is a figure in the story one can believe a jury without the information can go either way on (though more that he did it), and also the bevvy of usually Day Players and character actors that get to shine more or less (Cedric "but Black Dynamite I sell drugs to the community" Yarborough, Leslie Bibb and Adrienne C Moore come to mind), Juror 2 fits concisely into the run of late-period morality plays that Eastwood has brought forth with more or less artistic rigor and success.

While sometimes this can be a little muddled (American Sniper) other times it's storytelling and character work that can pierce your heart (Mystic River), in particular as the main character is someone we don't know how to feel about and... that's the point. He's compromised and perhaps we would put ourselves in his place if it were us, until very much it goes beyond most of us would find empathy anymore, and it isn't even a moral-gray zone but like this Washed Out in the Dark Gloomy Night of Rain Dark-Grey level where it is just about how someone can live with what they're doing (and as one sees in like Million Dollar Baby or Unforgiven... nah, not so well).

The film is a good tightrope walk of what is truth vs justice and how these bleed together until you can't really focus anymore. If it is marred by anything it's that a) some beats and lines in the jury room scenes show that Clint, for all the pros he had at his disposal, couldn't have hurt getting a take or two more out of a few of them (his One and Done reputation be damned), and b) though I get why it isn't there for pacing, it would've been interesting to see how a major story beat unfolds right before the verdict is reached near the end that is conspicuously left out. I might also add a c) that a note about the Simmons character even being on the jury at all is something to suspend a good deal of disbelief for (I could, but I get why it would be a bridge too far for some watching).

Still, despite its imperfections, this is a really good, entertaining pot-boiler that manages to be deftly about several things at once- guilt, distrust in relationships, addiction, moral terpitude- and though its not a "true" story it has enough credibility we buy into the premise and how it's executed....

This is all to get to the last point which is not about the quality of the film itself (though that the movie works and is good is not nothing), but how it's being released. This got unceremoniously dumped on to 50 screens throughout North America for... reasons I can't fathom except that the head of Warners (Zaslav, who's name rolls off the tongue like a shitty Star Wars villain) is petty and vindictive and looked at Cry Macho as some career-ending fiasco - which would have struggled at any time and got double knee-capped by the day and date mandate of 2021 - and that the next film out from Clint fucking Eastwood (unfortunately not based on some major figure like Sully or J Edgar or with a giant bankable star, albeit Hoult isn't no one either and could use the boost) should get the absolute minimal amount of attention, even to where (we shall see) the studio may not even report on box office numbers?  It's not a joke, it's a box-office rope, Taco!

How it was even saved from just going to streaming is practically anyone's guess, and it is a sad, mind-boggling state for someone like Eastwood (who, putting any personal politics aside, was a cultural touchstone for Warners going back... when was Dirty Harry again) on what is likely (barring some Manoel de Oliveira-like triumph of spirit over body) his final feature to get the equivalent of when an orphan is given two beans for a dinner in an old British novel. There is no good reason, if this couldn't be allotted two or three thousand theaters to get like, I dunno, 400 or 500? Did Clyde the Orangutan shit in your cereal, David?

Anyway, if you can see this before it becomes part of the slop of Warners-Discovery content on Max, try to do so. It's the cherry on top of a poor situation that started with Batgirl and has gotten worse from here.