Running time: 113 minutes.Rated PG-13 (some violent images and strong language).
In theaters.It’s an injustice that duds like “Joker: Folie a Deux” and “Megalopolis” played on thousands of screens around the country while Clint Eastwood’s engrossing new film about justice, “Juror No.2,” will only grace 50. The swell courtroom drama could very well be the 94-year-old “Million Dollar Baby” director’s swan song, though he hasn’t said as much.
And why should the gunslinger jump the gun? The man still knows how to make a damn good movie.How bizarre that most audiences will have to wait for the streaming debut to see Eastwood’s film.But “Juror No.
2” and its vanishing ilk scare studios today: Morally complex, smart fare that’s made for adults.What should frighten Hollywood execs is comic book villains who sing showtunes, but I digress.Even during the movie’s sporadic moments of clunkiness, you’re always tense, you’re always thinking, you’re always filled with a realistic dread.
You’re always wondering, “Could this happen to me?”The conundrum we wrestle with is a tricky one.Nicholas Hoult, an underrated actor who’s one of his generation’s finest, plays Justin, a jury member who begins to believe that he committed the crime — not the defendant.One year earlier a woman named Kendall (Francesca Eastwood, Clint’s 31-year-old daughter) was found dead at the bottom of an overpass, having been bludgeoned with a hard object and then pushed over the rail. That’s what they think, anyway.The man on trial is her violent, tatted boyfriend, James (Gabriel Basso), who was witnessed arguing with her at a bar nearby.
She stormed off down the street and he followed her.But, as the details of the case are revealed, paranoid Justin recalls that he hit something with his car on the very same road late that night.He couldn’t find a body, and he hoped it was at most a deer.
Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t.Whatever the case, his te...