‘Juror #2’ Movie Review: Clint Eastwood’s Still Got It
Clint Eastwood gives aspiring filmmakers a true lesson in shot-reverse-shot with Juror #2, a gripping procedural thriller on the fallacies of our legal system.
It baffles me that David Zaslav would ever want to bury a movie like ‘Juror #2’. Even if it would be the worst film of all time (it isn’t), the gesture doesn’t make a lick of sense symbolically. Clint Eastwood is 94 years old. He knows time is running out. This could very well be his last movie, though one never says never until the ultimate trip begins. He has always made movies at Warner Bros. on time and under budget. They have mostly been critical and commercial darlings, with some even going as far as to snag several Academy Award nominations and even win the biggest Oscar of them all.
The mere thought of burying Eastwood’s (potential, Manoel de Oliviera made movies until 106) last movie and releasing it in little to no cinemas with a meager marketing campaign (and no press screenings to anyone not living in Los Angeles or New York) is criminal. Amidst all the anti-art decisions Zaslav has made since taking control of Warner Bros, this is the one that pissed me off the most. In fact, when the previous regime at Warner Bros. told Zaslav that they felt indebted to Eastwood’s legacy at the studio, even with Cry Macho not being one of his most well-received films, the current CEO was baffled and said, “We don’t owe anyone any favors. It’s not show friends; it’s show business.”
Hollywood doesn’t owe anyone any favors, for sure, but Eastwood is an exception. The man has done so much for the viability of cinema and has a work ethic that few filmmakers do. An “I got one more left in me” movie is a simple ask, not a favor. And after one sees Juror #2, it’s hard to figure out a world in which the movie doesn’t get released wide in every single cinema possible. Yet, we live in this world, and one must contend with the shortsighted business decisions made to kill this art we should protect and cherish.
But here’s the thing: Juror #2 will stand the test of time and live far longer than the megaflop that was Joker: Folie à Deux. Its precise, airtight examination of a man forced to participate in something he does not want to be in will quietly blow you away by the time it reaches its incredible final shot and what could be the last image composed by Eastwood in his storied career. Ending it in such a way benefits the movie, but Eastwood, whose previous picture, Cry Macho, was an absolute disaster. In that 2021 picture, one could feel the filmmaker’s exhaustion behind (and in front of) the camera as an aging rodeo star tasked to reunite a young boy with his father.
But in Juror #2, Eastwood decides to sharpen his skills as the master of the shot-reverse-shot and deliver a psychological drama precisely based on this technique, where each glance a character makes in front of someone cuts deeper than a knife while the jurors are playing mind games with each other. The premise is incredibly simple, too: Recovering alcoholic/journalist Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is summoned by the court to serve on the jury regarding the murder of Kendall Carter (Francesca Eastwood) by her boyfriend, James Michael Sythe (Gabriel Basso). The alleged perpetrator has maintained his innocence, while prospective District Attorney Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette) thinks otherwise.
Justin is introduced in the courtroom as a polite, gentle man with no apparent flaws or connections with the case. But as he begins to listen to what happened on that fateful night, Eastwood and editors David S. Cox and Joel Cox cut back to the day of the murder, and memories begin to haunt him again. Why is that? Well, there’s a simple enough answer to this question: he was there. Funnily enough, one could miss him entirely if you don’t look at one specific point of Yves Bélanger’s frame, always in control of what he knows Eastwood wants to reveal right away to keep audiences at their toes.
This is information that Killebrew, public defender Eric Resnick (Chris Messina), and the other jurors do not know about. And the trial seems to be going swimmingly. The evidence overwhelmingly proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Sythe is guilty. As the jurors begin to deliberate, everyone believes the same…except for Justin. You see, he knows something the other jurors – and the respective attorneys – don’t. This gets revealed at the top of the movie, which could’ve been a faux pas for Eastwood for the audience to obtain this information so early.
However, it feeds Hoult’s career-best performance as Justin, who modulates strong feelings of dread and anxiety at every turn while attempting to manipulate the jury into reaching a verdict they may not feel comfortable with. Eastwood, the ever-so-sturdy filmmaker, uses artful shot-reverse-shot conversations to exacerbate the dreading angst inside him. Justin tries to repress himself from revealing any form of emotion (because it could be perceived as bias in the courtroom), but his slight twitches and body language immediately betray him.
We then observe our protagonist slowly decaying in front of our eyes as the jury further analyzes the case and notices glaring irregularities. One of its members, Harold (J.K. Simmons), is a retired police detective who begins to suspect that Sythe did not bludgeon Kendall to death, as it was initially laid out, but was rather the victim of a hit and run. When he gets too close to the truth, something happens that completely changes our perspective of Justin. Initially a decent man with a troubled past, Juror No. 2 now reaches a point of no return in attempting to insert his own biases on the trial to sway the jury in one completely different direction than their initial gut feelings.
Most of its members are impervious to his manipulative tactics, except for Marcus (Cedric Yarbrough), who sees right through Justin’s BS. Eastwood’s direction of these scenes is so calculated, with mathematical precision at showcasing and withholding critical information he hasn’t employed since toying with us all in American Sniper. Perhaps this is the longing knowledge that his time is slowly drifting away, that he wants to put everything he can into the camera before he gets a chance to say goodbye. It’s that urgency that drives him to draw the most compelling work of his career in ages, acting not only as a coda to his long list of accomplishments in cinema but as tangible proof that age is just a number.
However, when Juror #2 reaches its bravura final shot, one has the impression that Eastwood should end it here. An image so powerful will stay with this critic for a long time. It’s such a simple one, too, but Hoult’s eyes conveying the torment of a thousand fires help solidify the moment as one of the best-ever frames of Eastwood’s more than fifty-year-long career. He doesn’t look like age will stop him from churning out something else, but there’s a pure sense of finality in Juror #2’s ending that it’s hard not to want more from him. My mind always wants another Eastwood picture. But I’d happily want to leave him be for however long he has left. He’s accomplished so much and gave us one more picture to hold onto. Let’s cherish it forever, and hope cinema can move forward through this ultimate lesson from one of our greatest masters.