Review: Juror #2 (2024)

Leave it to 94-year-old Clint Eastwood to rejuvenate a moribund movie season with a film that feels like a classic Hollywood drama in all the best ways. The success of Juror #2 starts with the debut script from Jonathan Abrams, which conjures the ideal dramatic scenario to showcase the endless moral complexities of the justice system. It continues with the cast, particularly Nicholas Hoult and Toni Collette, who refuse to overplay the material and instead allow every nuance of the film’s moral inquiry to play out in their performances. And it all comes together due to Eastwood’s deft, mostly hands-off, approach to classical Hollywood filmmaking.

Eastwood is famous for doing only one take on his movies if nothing technical goes wrong. He trusts the actors to prepare for the scenes and trusts his rehearsals to carry through his directorial intent. If he trusts the text and the experts performing it, both in front of and behind the camera, he also trusts the viewer in a way that truly harkens back to great classic Hollywood films, especially courtroom dramas like 12 Angry Men (1957) and Anatomy of a Murder (1959).

Juror #2 concerns its titular juror, Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult), a magazine writer and recovering alcoholic living in Savannah, Georgia, who is called to serve on the jury of a murder trial. A woman, Kendall Carter (Francesca Eastwood), is found dead in a ravine after storming off on her boyfriend, James Sythe (Gabriel Basso), after a blow-up fight at a bar. James is an abusive boyfriend with a checkered past, and the fight was caught on camera, so the case seems cut and dried that James killed Kendall—but not to Justin.

It turns out that Justin was at the bar that night, tempted to fall off the wagon in the wake of his wife, Ally’s (Zoey Deutch), late term miscarriage, and he hit a deer on the way home in a rainstorm. Or at least he thought he did until he sees the evidence laid out before him and realizes he killed Kendall Carter accidentally that night. Thus, the moral dilemma of Juror #2 is that Justin must try to persuade the other jurors to acquit James Sythe without implicating himself in the process.

Justin is in an impossible dilemma, where there’s no clear-cut right way to get out of his predicament. James was an abusive boyfriend who is likely deserving of punishment for past transgressions, but he’s not guilty of murder. Justin wasn’t drunk that night and only hit Kendall because she was walking on the shoulder in the midst of a heavy rainstorm, but no one would believe that he wasn’t drunk based on past DUI convictions. If Justin confesses, he’ll go to prison for sure, right as his wife is due to give birth after a high-risk pregnancy. What is justice in this scenario? Should a good man have his life ruined to save a bad man from a false conviction?

Juror #2 twists the screws and puts Justin through the ringer, and so much of the film’s pleasure is in watching Hoult act his way out of these scenarios. Justin is constantly concealing so much in every scene, but his anxiety is evident to us and to other characters who know him well. Hoult puts in a subtle performance, where he’s always trying to tamp-down his speechifying to other jurors so as not to let on too much of his knowledge about the case, but can’t help but enjoy being the centre of attention and knowing the truth of the matter. There’s more than a touch of Tom Cruise, especially in A Few Good Men (1992) and The Firm (1993), to Hoult’s performance, a kind of all-American charm and decency with a touch of weasel lurking beneath the surface. He’s terrific, especially later in the film as he’s forced to confront his own guilt and verbalize the complicated feelings clouding his mind.

Eastwood also trusts dolling out information to the audience to round out the portrait of Justin and his predicament. For instance, we first see him fiddling with his sobriety chit, and then later learn the details of his alcoholism. We learn early on that he’s hesitant to serve the jury duty because Ally is late in her pregnancy, but only later learn that his fear is borne out of her past late-term miscarriage. Eastwood patiently builds out his characters like he’s building a case, the movie taking a cue from legal acumen: it’s clear, it’s patient, it’s deliberate.

The strength of the storytelling is also in showing that Justin is not the only character faced with a difficult scenario. The movie also focuses on the prosecutor, Toni Collette’s Faith Killebrew, who is using the murder trial as a springboard for her campaign for District Attorney. If she can get a conviction, she’s essentially guaranteed of winning the election. But her own conscience starts to eat at her the deeper they get into the deliberation. If she reduces Kendall and James to mere pawns in her political ambitions, how can she truly serve justice in the process? Much like 12 Angry Men before it, Juror #2 also shows how the process of jury duty itself already stacks the deck against defendants. People in the jury are eager to get back to their lives and avoid wasting their time, so they’re predisposed to throw James, a slimeball, in prison and move on with their lives.

So much of the power of Juror #2 comes from its screenplay, which calculates such an exacting predicament that keeps us sympathetic with the characters but is also clear-eyed about their actions and mistakes. It’s impossible not to see ourselves in Justin’s shoes, but also Faith’s and even James Sythe’s, for that matter. It’s a movie with an enormous capacity for empathy and understanding, but one that refuses to make any grand moral judgments about its characters or their actions, even if it’s clear about the truth in every moment.

The film ultimately argues that our institutional justice is not a case of black and white, but rather lives in the grey area where some element of justice or truth is betrayed in the service of the greater good. This approach is so fitting for a Clint Eastwood movie, as Eastwood is perhaps the foremost chronicler of the grey areas of American justice over the past half century. If Juror #2 ends up being his final film (God forbid), it’ll be a remarkable closing statement from one of America’s great filmmakers.

9 out of 10

Juror #2 (2024, USA)

Directed by Clint Eastwood; written by Jonathan Abrams; starring Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette, J. K. Simmons, Chris Messina, Zoey Deutch, Cedric Yarbrough, Kiefer Sutherland.

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