What are the chances, eh? First you get picked for jury duty even though your pregnant wife might deliver your child before you can deliver a verdict. Then it transpires that you alone know for certain that the defendant accused of murder is innocent. How can you be sure? Because you are the guilty party. Small world!
This is the bind in which Justin – it sounds a bit like “justice”, right? – finds himself at the start of Juror #2, directed with intermittent drollery by Clint Eastwood. Jonathan Abrams’s twisty script sometimes lays the irony on a bit thick. The opening scene shows Justin’s wife (Zoey Deutch) wearing a blindfold like Lady Justice. And we already know that her husband won’t be squeaky-clean by the way she tells him: “You’re perfect!” But Nicholas Hoult, whose angelic looks are undercut by the devilish little upticks in his eyebrows, is a perfect fit for the everyman whose secrets emerge in conflicting flashbacks like a mini Rashomon.
Driving at night in a rainstorm, Justin had hit what he believed was a deer – but which he only now realises was a woman making her way home on foot after a public screaming match with her boyfriend, AKA the accused. Before you can say “Objection!”, Justin is Googling “vehicular homicide” and consulting a lawyer pal (Kiefer Sutherland) who gives it to him straight (“You’re screwed!”). His priority is to steer his fellow jurors away from a guilty verdict without implicating himself in the process.
Suspense is kept on a low flame but the film offers cosy pleasures, not least in the jury-room wrangles; one thing Henry Fonda never had to deal with in 12 Angry Men was the pernicious influence of true-crime podcasts. It’s a tad strange that the murder victim, whose body is repeatedly shown twisted and bloodied at the bottom of a creek, is played by Eastwood’s daughter Francesca. But it is rather lovely that the casting of Toni Collette as the prosecuting attorney makes it seem as if she is locked in a battle of wills with her own son, since that was the role played by Hoult two decades ago in About a Boy.
The bar to which the story keeps returning in flashback is named Rowdy’s Hideaway –a sweet nod to Rowdy Yates, the role that made Eastwood’s name in the TV western series Rawhide. Juror #2 wouldn’t be such a bad way for the 94-year-old director to bow out if the film represents, as he has intimated, his final summing up.