‘Juror #2’ Review: 12 Annoying Men and Women Deliberate in Clint Eastwood’s Courtroom Clunker | AFI FEST

A staple on TV growing up in the 1990s was the courtroom drama. Movies like A Few Good Men, Philadelphia, Primal Fear, My Cousin Vinny, and a handful of John Grisham adaptations made audiences, and a little boy in Texas, entertained by escaping into the courtroom full of twists and turns with a side of moral consequences added to the final verdict of each film. Last year, we watched as some of the most talked about films of 2023 were able to tap back into this intrigue of a courtroom drama and deliver that excitement again in films Oppenheimer, Anatomy of a Fall, and Killers of the Flower Moon, The Burial, and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial. These films can be not only pure popcorn movies with giant ensemble casts, but a chance for auteur filmmakers to put their stamps or directorial signatures on one of the richest subgenres in film history. For Juror #2, Clint Eastwood delivers his version of a courtroom drama from the eyes of a potentially guilty juror; an interesting idea on paper that mostly keeps you invested till it stumbles to the finish line and leaves you frustrated with how things wrap up.

Juror #2 follows Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult), a regional magazine writer and devoted husband to his wife Allison, who is pregnant with their first child. Both of them are dreading the idea of him being selected for jury duty, but Justin assures his wife that he will do his best to get out of serving because he knows he needs to be around her at all times as she is in a high-risk pregnancy, and needs her husband close in case of an emergency. When he goes into the courthouse and tries to explain his situation to the judge (Amy Aquino), she just turns him and all other juror conflicts down, with a hammy little speech about how “important” it is to perform their civic duty and take part in a murder case that has rocked the community of Savannah, Georgia, the director’s first time making a film here since Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. 

On an October evening, in the pouring rain, Kendall Carter (Francesca Eastwood, Clint’s daughter) and her boyfriend James Sythe (Gabriel Basso, Hillbilly Elegy) get into a drunken altercation about moving in together and taking their relationship to the next level. When Sythe says no, he breaks a beer bottle with pieces hitting Carter, making her walk out of the bar into the rain where they yell at each other some more, leading her to walk home instead of getting into his car. The next day, Carter is found at the bottom of a ditch near “Old Quarry Road” (a new drinking game in the making with the numerous times this location is mentioned throughout the film), with Sythe arrested for the crime. Eerily similar to the flight sequences in Sully, Eastwood shows us these events multiple times through the perspective of three characters to understand the full picture of that fateful night, even if it gets repetitive since not much new information is learned each go-round. We know what really happens the moment the trail starts.

Taking on the case for the state is Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette, donning a Southern accent via Kyra Sedgwick of TNT’s The Closer), a county prosecutor who is trying to use this case to boost her chances of securing her winning in the local District Attorney’s race. There is an eerie feeling of familiarity with Faith’s introduction, with a local radio station stating they are “two weeks” from the elections, much like we are in real life right now. Is it a coincidence that this movie is set in Georgia, a battleground state and the source of conflict in the 2020 election? Sure, if you don’t think about it but this is a movie from Clint Eastwood, who released Richard Jewell back in 2019, a movie about how you shouldn’t trust the FBI in a time where the FBI was investigating President Donald Trump for his role in the 2016 election. While the events of that movie are factual in how the FBI mistreated that case, it was as clear as day the message Eastwood was sending out was overtly political, and now with Juror #2, he is using Faith, a female prosecutor, to lock up a character played by someone who played J.D. Vance in another film, and he is the innocent one, with her potential biggest career achievement being built on the back of a lie; yeah Clint, we get who you are voting for.

On the other side of the aisle is a friendly face for Faith, public defender and former law school classmate Eric Resnick (Chris Messina). Some of the best scenes in the film are Collette and Messina getting to sit at a bar and talk about their case and their relationship, grounding the film momentarily before the absurdity of the trial they are about to do starts. During jury selection, as they are asking questions back and forth to prospective jurors, the film showcases just how simplistic their styles are, seemingly not asking enough questions to each prospective juror to gage their knowledge of the case, their background, if they know or were in law enforcement (aka the J.K. Simmons character), or, for the case of Justin, if he knew either of the parties involved and was there the night of the fight. As it’s the central premise of the film, it’s not a spoiler or reveal to say that once selected, and sitting in the jury box hearing the case and evidence, memories of that October night flash back into Justin’s mind and he realizes that the deer he thought he hit with his car wasn’t an animal at all, but was Kendall Carter.

Just like Justin, it’s hard to see much going on in these sequences through the dark, dreary cinematography from Yves Bélanger, carrying that dusty gray look found in most Eastwood films, only slightly more of the vibe of a straight to streaming component like his previous film, Cry Macho. Though four years sober, on the anniversary of what would’ve been the due date of twin babies they lost due to a miscarriage, Justin hit a low moment, went to the nearest bar and bought a glass of whiskey. Hoult is at his best in these scenes as he brings to life the vulnerability within Justin to hit that low point yet again in one’s life, only to realize that the drink won’t solve this tragedy that his family was facing. While he hates himself for getting to that point, and makes the right choice by going home, the consequences of his actions have much more of a lingering effect than just one drink. From the moment he realizes he is responsible for her death, Justin and the audience spend the remaining run time trying to assess his options and see if a confession is enough to save his family and his soul. 

The trial itself is wrapped up pretty quickly by most courtroom drama standards. We hear pretty standard opening statements from both sides, a couple of witnesses that saw the events of the night, a forensic expert, Sythe defending himself on the stand, and then closing arguments from both sides basically saying, “find him innocent,” “find him guilty.” Once you know that Justin is the one that ran over Carter, most of the suspense is taken out of the picture. Screenwriter Jonathan Abrams (his debut work) shines the best showcasing the standard mundanity of how these courtrooms and trials take place, and highlights the harsh humanity found in the deliberation room once the case is turned over to the twelve jurors. I’ve served on a jury for a murder trial before, and just like Justin, I listened as the people around me turned from mostly pleasant throughout the trial to wanting to throw the book at someone without weighing the evidence in front of them. “I need to get home to my kids” or “this is wasting our time” is used by jurors throughout the second act of the film, with minds made up, unwilling to change. It is something that when you know Justin is one fighting for a “not guilty” verdict and wanting the rest of his counterparts to see his side, it’s a fascinating examination of what happens when you know someone didn’t commit the crime but the mountain is too tall to climb to get others out of their comfort zone to reach a point of seeing the other side of the argument. It’s social, political and sadly how our modern world is. Yet, while the message behind these ideas is compelling, Abram’s script includes some of the strangest character decisions in a legal drama in recent memory, from an older female juror delivering silly, stereotypical one liners to J.K. Simmons’ juror being a cop and going on his own mission to uncover the truth only for Justin to get him kicked off the jury for another juror who is big into true crime podcasts to, the most insane moment in the film, when Cedric Yarbrough’s juror explains why he can’t change his mind because Sythe was once a member of drug cartel that hurt his community via him working for the “Boys and Girls Club of America.” Some serious issues mixed with laughable, cringe worthy moments make the second act of the film an uneven, modern version of 12 Angry Men (a vastly relevant film still today).

All of this might have been fine if Juror #2 was able to stick the landing in the final twenty minutes when Justin’s actions catch up to him and Faith finds out the truth about her case. They do share a single scene together, and not only is a reunion for Hoult and Collette from last working together on About a Boy 22 years ago, they are genuinely good opposite each other, diving head first into the morality of the situation, before coming up with a solution that mostly satisfies both of their agendas. But again, Abrams’ script shortchanges them from having a real cathartic finale that provides Eastwood the emotional punch we’ve seen him land throughout his filmography in films like Unforgiven, The Bridges of Madison County, Million Dollar Baby, Letters from Iwo Jima and more. The performances by Hoult, Collette and Messina, are up to the task of carrying something hefty to the finish line, but every time we get somewhere remotely interesting via the cat and mouse like nature of the case and Justin versus Faith, we cut back to way too many distracting characters and moments that just don’t work at all with the film’s overall pace, like every scene involving Zoey Deutch as Ally, Justin’s wife. So when we get to the climax of the film, we are left empty, as if the gripping ride we went on was ultimately for nothing. It’s a shame, because with this being the rumored final film in Eastwood’s directorial career, it was a disappointing note to end on. But between Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, Robert Zemeckis’ Here, and now Eastwood’s Juror #2, it might be safe to say that not all legendary directors need to keep chugging along in their careers, making lesser films just to keep working. Pull up that chair from the RNC and sit on the porch Clint, it’s okay to rest now.

Grade: C-

This review is from AFI FEST 2024. Warner Bros will give Juror #2 a limited theatrical release on November 1.