Juror #2, the 40th and perhaps final movie of Clint Eastwood’s directing career, is 113 minutes of ethical quandary: Specifically, what would you do if you found yourself serving on a jury for a crime you actually committed? The set-up is pretty simple — one dark rainy night, Justin (Nicholas Hoult) was driving home when he hit something on a country road; when he got out to inspect the damage to his car, he didn’t see any signs of what he hit, and thanks to a nearby sign he assumed it was a deer.
It’s only a year later that Justin realizes what actually happened, and that’s because he’s sitting in the jury box for a murder trial, learning about a young woman presumably killed by her boyfriend on that very road, on that very night. The boyfriend doesn’t seem like a great guy, but Justin knows he’s innocent of this specific crime. The question is, what will he do about it?
It’s a meaty enough premise for a drama, and Eastwood really leans hard into building up the audience’s sympathy for Justin, an overtly good man with a beautiful wife and baby on the way, who works as a magazine journalist in the year 2022 and can still afford a nice house. Justin’s one major flaw is that he’s an alcoholic in recovery, which is why he doesn’t think he can come forward with his story — since no one will believe that he didn’t actually have a drink at the bar he was at prior to the accident, and he already has a DUI on his record.
(This humble writer is not a legal expert, so I cannot state at this time whether or not Justin’s friend/attorney, played by Kiefer Sutherland, actually gave him good advice on that front or only made the situation worse. Also, “Why didn’t he just turn himself in?” technically falls into the same category of questioning as asking “Why didn’t Katherine Heigl just get an abortion in Knocked Up?” Which is to say, valid, but also the end of the movie before it begins.)
Once Juror #2 gets going, it steadily delivers twists, especially when J.K. Simmons’ retired police detective, another jury member, can’t resist his own investigation. The stacked supporting cast also includes Toni Collette as the ambitious prosecutor who does still care about justice, and the unheralded Cedric Yarbrough delivers maybe the best performance of the film.
However, there are a few bits of direction that inspired titters in the theater, thanks to some moments of melodrama that ended up being a little overplayed. And its biggest issue is that it feels like a time capsule on a number of levels.
For one thing, the action is very specifically set in October 2022, with the events of the murder taking place in October 2021, yet doesn’t reflect the actual reality of that period. Lately, Hollywood has taken a very lax approach to authentically incorporating the impact of the pandemic on everyday life post-2020, but it’s still disconcerting to see people milling about in public spaces ostensibly just a few years ago with no hand sanitizer or masking on display. Honestly, just setting it in like the year 2017 would have been a saner choice.
Juror #2 (Warner Bros.)
More importantly, though, the very set-up of this movie belongs to a whole different era — specifically the ’80s and ’90s, a golden age for the complex adult legal drama that rarely finds a foothold in theaters today. (I keep double-checking to see if this movie was secretly based on a John Grisham novel from 1997, but no, it appears to be an original idea from writer Jonathan Abrams. Go figure.)
And while thirty years ago, Juror #2 would have dominated at the box office, today Warner Bros. literally won’t reveal how much money it made domestically in its first weekend of release. The term for this is “burying,” which is a curious way for Warner Bros. to treat what could be Eastwood’s last film — at the very least, it feels like there’s promotional juice in emphasizing that fact for adult movie-goers.
Let’s be clear: Clint Eastwood has been an institution in this industry for longer than most people get to live on this planet. His film career began in 1955, when he appeared in four different movies: Lady Godiva of Coventry, Francis in the Navy, Revenge of the Creature, and Tarantula! Dwight D. Eisenhower was President. Eastwood was 25 years old.
After 217 episodes of the Western TV series Rawhide, he became one of film’s great Western film stars, then just one of Hollywood’s biggest and brightest. At the age of 41, he made his directorial debut with the thriller Play Misty for Me. Richard Nixon was President then.
Eastwood would go on to direct what is now a total of 40 feature films; there’s a temptation to say that Eastwood worked in a variety of genres over the course of his career, but that’s only sort of the case. Yes, he made plenty of great Westerns in addition to thrillers and character dramas, but as a director, his taste has always been pretty specific: Movies for grown-ups, as the AARP might refer to them. No supes, no sci-fi, no silliness. (With the vague exception of Space Cowboys.)
If Juror #2 is Eastwood’s last movie, it’s him going out with a whimper, not a bang — at least in terms of the film’s cultural impact. However, Warner Bros.’s handling of it makes it also feel like a bellwether for the rest of the industry, a sign that there really isn’t room for movies like this at the major studios anymore. Want big stars grappling with Earth-bound moral quandaries? That’s what the indies and television are for now, and that is admittedly a pretty robust option these days. (Say the word, Clint, and Apple TV+ will be at your front door with a greenlight for a six-episode limited series.)
Yet this still represents a sad moment, continued confirmation of the ways that Hollywood has changed. Life is change, of course: Since Tarantula!, man landed on the moon, three women have won an Oscar for Best Director, and this Internet thing means we can watch so many great classic films, including many of Eastwood’s finest, with just the click of a button.
It’s hard to expect Eastwood to adapt dramatically to this new reality — after all, the dude is 94 years old. At least with Juror #2, he’s being true to himself to the very end, telling exactly the story he wanted to tell. The kind of story he’s been telling from the beginning.
Juror #2 is in theaters now.