JUROR NO. 2

JUROR NO. 2

Directed by Clint Eastwood

94 year old Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood returns behind the camera to give us his 40th and (possibly last) directorial feature. A tense legal drama with definite thriller elements and actual movie stars. They quite literally don't make them like they used to, ladies and gentlemen I give you JUROR#2.

Nicholas Hoult (looking tan, chiseled and 7 feet tall) stars as your regular man Justin, a recovering alcoholic with a high risk pregnancy wife at home. One day he is called and assigned into a jury for a brutal murder case. A woman found beat up and dead in a ditch with the narrative being it was her abusive boyfriend. Yet the details of the case start to come to light, Justin was at that bar that same night...he was on the same road...is it possible the deer he though he hit turned out to be this dead woman? 

A delicious plot hook if I ever saw one. What follows is the intense moral quandary at the center of our main character. Does he come clean or let the other guy take the fall? Eastwood and screenwriter Jonathan Abrams do an excellent job of keeping everything just vague enough to keep audiences not totally sure whose narrative is the "truth". The supporting cast is stacked from top to bottom with (mother)Toni Collette as the prosecutor, (sexy)Chris Mesina as the defense attorney,  (daddy)JK Simmons as a fellow juror and holy hell is that (father) Kiefer Sutherland too??

I thought I had it all figured out in my head but the more I think about this film after the fact the more I realize there's more uncertainty in the details than I thought. No one comes out clean out of this and the points the film tried to make about lazy police work and bias are interesting to say the least. All leading to an excellent and quite unexpected ending. This is a future cable classic, my mom would've loved this one.

⭐⭐⭐.5 out of 4