Clint Eastwood — movie star, award-winning auteur, icon of stoic masculinity, man who occasionally talks to chairs — turned 94 this past May. It may be weird to mention this upfront, although talk of age, the ravages of time, and the art of knowing when to gracefully retire has been a steady topic of conversation in the first half of 2024. None of that hand-wringing seems to apply to our man Clint, however. In the past decade, the actor-director has made eight movies, ranging from musicals (Jersey Boys) to docu-thrillers (The 15:17 to Paris) to complicated-men biopics (Sully, Richard Jewell). The dude keeps pumping films out well into his winter years.
You may not love all of them. A few do err on the side of being a little musty. But you couldn’t accuse Eastwood of stumbling through his behind-the-camera duties or phoning things in. Each of these, including his latest — the courtroom drama with a conscience Juror #2 — are marked by a steadfast professionalism, a steady hand and an interest in old-fashioned types of storytelling usually gilded with questions. Such as: What does it mean to be a hero? How and when do you sanction the use of violence? At what point do the ends stop justifying the means?
And, in the case of this throwback potboiler: What do concepts such as “justice” and “accountability” mean in this day and age? Like a lot of us, Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) doesn’t want his everyday life to be hijacked by the civic inconvenience commonly known as jury duty. Besides, his wife, Allison (Zoey Deutsch) is dealing with a high-risk pregnancy and a rapidly approaching due date, and he wants to be there for her. But he’s begged off twice already, so Justin has to report for potential selection at the courthouse in downtown Savannah, Georgia. Long story short: He gets picked.
The case involves a brutish boyfriend (Gabriel Basso, who played J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy… but don’t hold that against him) accused of beating his girlfriend (Francesca Eastwood) to death. They had been arguing at a roadhouse bar, he violently knocked a beer bottle off the table, and she took off into the night despite the fact that a storm was raging. Her body was found at the bottom of a creek by a hiker the next morning. The public defender, Eric Resnick (Chris Messina), suggests she slipped on the rain-slicked roads and fell over a guardrail. The prosecutor, Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette), believes it’s an open-and-shut example of domestic violence. Given that she’s running for district attorney on a platform of protecting women and a win could earn her some political capital, she’s determined to see this guy in prison.
Then a funny thing happens on the way to the verdict. As Resnick and Killebrew lay out the facts, Kemp begins to remember some things. Like, for example, the fact that he happened to be at that very same bar on the night that the argument took place. A recovering alcoholic, he’d nearly relapsed, yet managed to leave before giving in to his demons. As he was driving home, Kemp thought he’d hit a deer. Despite getting out of his vehicle and looking around, he didn’t see anything on the road. Surely, that loud thump he heard was just a… wait, it couldn’t have been… oh, dear god….
This is the conundrum that Juror #2 sets up, in which the end result of “Guilty” or “Not Guilty” plays second fiddle to a guilt-ridden conscience. If Kemp steps forward, according to his Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor (Kiefer Sutherland) who happens to be a lawyer, he’s likely going to be charged with vehicular manslaughter. If he says nothing, an innocent man will go to prison. Once Kemp is sequestered away with his fellow jurors — a lineup that includes a perky foreman (Leslie Bibb), a gent (Cedric Yarborough) with a specific chip on his shoulder regarding the defendant, and a grizzled old retiree (J.K. Simmons) who may have more familiarity with these types of cases then he’d previously disclosed — they decide to take a preliminary vote. Everyone immediately votes for an indictment. Everybody except one: Kemp.
What follows is something like 12 Angry Men if written by John Grisham, with a dollop of the classic 1948 noir The Big Clock thrown in for good measure. (To wit: Ray Milland is a journalist tasked with solving a murder in which he is the main suspect. It’s fantastic.) There are a wide variety of elements that get thrown in courtesy of Jonathan Abrams’ script, ranging from marital melodrama to the merits of true crime podcasts to a glancing mention of gang tattoos (!) that almost kinda sorta becomes a plot point. Hoult does a good job of giving you a sweaty, twitchy everyguy torn between wanting to protect himself and his family, and feeling compelled to not simply convict someone out of a sense of self-preservation. Even though she’s gunning for a win, Collette’s aggressive prosecutor also starts to poke around once the idea of innocence is planted in her head, effectively adding a detective-story sidebar into the mix.
As for Eastwood, he’s guilty on three counts of wanting to entertain folks like it’s still 1992; two counts of trying to get all those TV viewers who ate up Apple TV+’s recent Presumed Innocent remake back into movie theaters; and a first-degree attempt to use a well-worn genre to dig into knotty ideas of morality. Not all of it works — the ending should technically qualify this as a mistrial — but you can’t deny the ambition even as you begrudgingly acknowledge the wilder swings and fustier exchanges. As for whether this is the last film Eastwood gets the opportunity to make, the jury is still out on that. But you can’t accuse him of resting on his laurels. Artists half his age couldn’t come up with a cinéma du airport read this intriguing.