'Juror No. 2' Review: Clint Eastwood's Final Film Doesn't Sway the Jury

A fantastic cast flounders in this stodgy courtroom procedural

One could write an article, or a series of articles, about the legacy of Clint Eastwood’s directorial canon. (Shoutout to my friend Corey Atad’s ongoing series about this topic.) When it was revealed that Eastwood might be hanging up his directorial hat with the release of Juror #2, and that long-time home studio Warner Bros. was only going to release it in 50 theaters, what felt like mild interest in Eastwood’s latest quickly intensified. Being in the room during the film’s AFI Fest premiere had everyone kiss the ring while simultaneously saying farewell to a man who has made some genuine classics.

Juror #2 is far from a genuine classic.

If anything, it continues Eastwood’s string of middling movies that display his thoughts on the justice system, masculinity, and whiteness that he’s been preaching for years. As I said on social media, Eastwood should have retired after the 2003 release of Mystic River. (Yes, I know Million Dollar Baby. I said what I said.)

Juror #2 is a near-two hour episode of Law and Order: Trial By Jury following reluctant juror Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult). Set to celebrate the arrival of his first child, Justin initially presume the case he’s involved in will be cut and dry. Things change, though, when Justin discovers that the case, involving a young woman presumably killed by her boyfriend, might have been caused by Justin himself.

First-time screenwriter Jonathan Abrams’ crafts a story that owes a debt to I Know What You Did Last Summer with its story of a man who has to decide whether to do the right thing and admit his potential culpability in the death of a young woman or condemn an innocent man to a life in prison. At least that’s what Juror #2 should be doing.

What it ends up being is the story of a privileged white guy trying to figure out the best way he can get out of ruining his life without being labeled a horrible person. It’s a shame because there is something interesting in the courtroom elements, particularly as audiences today know about how many wrongly incarcerated people (usually Black men) are mired in the prison system today.

Had this been in different hands it could have been a solid two-hander about the flaws of the justice system. As the altruistic public defender Erik Resnick (played by Chris Messina) mentions during one of several bar scenes opposite District Attorney Killebrew (Toni Collette): “To the justice system. It ain’t perfect but it’s what we’ve got.” And defendant James Sythe (Gabriel Basso) isn’t the perfect defendant. The only real things we know about him are he might have been a gang member and was an angry person.

As many of the jurors say, if not for this crime no doubt he’d be in prison. Unfortunately, Sythe — one of several names meant to bludgeon the audience over the head with their symbolism — isn’t given much to defend himself with outside of one lone scene. The film isn’t interested in him, nor is it interested with much about the how and why the justice system is the way it is.

What Abrams and Eastwood seem more interested in in keeping audiences’ on Justin’s side, even as he willfully tries to play both sides of the fence. But this ends up creating a world where everyone Justin interacts with seems incredibly dumb to not notice how ridiculously weird he acts. One could get drunk if they sipped every time Justin drops something at a crucial moment or viscerally reacts to his knowledge he might have been involved in the case. Anyone with eyes might have been like “Hmm, this guy seems a little too on edge.”

And because Justin’s home is in the space between fear and manipulation, the character spends a lot of time making wide eyes and staying quiet to plot his next move, which leaves poor Nicholas Hoult floundering for something to do. Because Justin is boring, Hoult gives a boring performance. There’s nothing ambiguous in his performance because the movie doesn’t think there’s any shades of gray. In one pivotal scene, Justin lays out that he is a good person who might have made a mistake but he’s sorry and that’s no reason to ruin his life, is it?

After spending the last few years hearing men screw up and then hoping the concept of them being goodhearted family men should be enough to forgive them their sins, it’s hard to buy what Justin is selling. But, boy, does the script want us to. The audience hears a lot about his past alcoholism and how bad things were in the before time, but not now. Numerous flashbacks, that could have had a strong Rashomon-like effect illustrating different viewpoints, always emphasizes that that day Justin was following the straight and narrow. The goal isn’t to put him on the same footing as Sythe, but to always remind you how Justin is better.

This isn’t To Kill a Mockingbird or even 12 Angry Men, though the movie believes it is in that vein with its moments of jury interaction and florid closing arguments from its well-motivated lawyers. It is interesting to hear how a modern audience looks at things, albeit the jury of James Sythe’s peers only includes 2 Black people, both of whom assume he’s guilty. Each are fairly one-note, one running a Boys and Girls Club as their only identifier and the other continually complaining about how she needs to get back to her kids. The other jurors are lacking in any distinguishing characteristics, outside of one losing custody of his daughter and another being a perpetually cheerful, and utterly wasted, Leslie Bibb.

The sole holdout is J.K. Simmons as a former cop turned flower shop owner who decides to go rogue and start investigating the case, for at least 20 minutes of screentime, on his own. This subplot is actually fairly laughable. The public defender vetting the jury knows about the one juror’s custody issues but he didn’t know there was a former law enforcement officer on the panel? And worse, he didn’t ask? But the film doesn’t have time to waste on technicalities, dammit. Simmons, though, is a lot of fun and it would have been nice to let him go through the entire movie as opposed to disappearing completely before the first hour is through. Or, better yet, put him in the lead.

But it’s the women that tend to suffer the worst in Juror No. 2, and I’m not talking solely about victim Kendall Carter, played by Eastwood’s own daughter. Zoey Deutch enters the pantheon of Eastwood’s supportive wives who’s sole job is to encourage their man. Here, she spends most of the film rocking a fake baby belly — and, hey, at least Clint sprang for a real baby this time round — and then playing with said baby. There’s one moment of her questioning her husband but mostly she’s there to provide a perpetual smile on her face and be Justin’s excuse for why he’s doing what he’s doing. She’s not a partner, she’s a prop.

Then there’s Toni Collette’s Faith Killebrew, and let’s just say there’s a reason her first name is Faith and her last name has Kill in it. Collette is always solid, no matter what type of accent she’s rocking (here it’s Southern). There’s nothing wrong with the performance, more so the character who is presented as a lonely (she has zero backstory) female politician hellbent on winning her platform with an emphasis on faith and supporting survivors of domestic violence.

It’s never explicated but it is alluded to that Kendall is less a person Faith is fighting for and more another notch for her platform. It’s definitely impossible to see the movie, which starts with a reminder on the radio to vote, and not see a political context. This comes to a head during the finale when Faith is told if certain news comes to light it will undermine her platform, almost as if to say Faith’s whole goal to help domestic violence cases is just another example of a woman going on a witch hunt for bad men.

Juror No. 2 has specious arguments about politics and the justice system but even more egregiously is how dull it is. The characters are bland and one-note and there’s a real TV quality to everything. It feels tired, no doubt like it’s director feels these days.

Grade: D