(Bloomberg) -- If a wildly entertaining new Clint Eastwood movie comes out in theaters, but no one knows it exists, has it even been released?
Permit my philosophizing: This is the case this weekend with Juror #2, the latest (and likely last) film from the 94-year-old Hollywood legend. Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.’s strange strategy for the film has become an object of fascination among some cinephiles; they’re perplexed about a studio that seems to be abandoning a movie by an acclaimed, commercially successful director who’s nearing the end of his life. Juror #2 is playing in fewer than 50 theaters nationwide, according to a report from Variety, which also noted that the studio was considering not reporting box-office numbers.The dumping of Juror #2 becomes even more frustrating when you realize one thing: This film is really good.
Eastwood’s Juror #2 is a twisty courtroom drama with a ridiculous premise that works thanks to propulsive filmmaking and great work from star Nicholas Hoult. It feels like one of those endlessly rewatchable ’90s legal thrillers, and it also has some weighty stuff on its mind as it interrogates the nature of what actually makes a man guilty and what it means to have justice served.
It’s a grim assessment of the state of cinema that less than 10 years ago, an Eastwood movie was a good bet in one way or another. The Mule in 2018 made more than $170 million worldwide, and though its box-office haul wasn’t great, Richard Jewell, a year later, got Kathy Bates an Oscar nomination.
But post-Covid it’s hard to get audiences out to theaters to see something that isn’t Deadpool & Wolverine. You can’t sell Juror #2 on communal experience the way you can with something shocking like body horror sensation The Substance, which means talky midsize movies are left by the industry wayside.
And yet there’s value to seeing something like Juror #2 in the theater—and not just because it’s probably one of the last Eastwood movies we’re ever going to get. In the darkness, you can really dial into a performance such as the one Hoult is giving, letting yourself ease into the tension that Eastwood creates.
Hoult plays Justin Kemp, a Georgia-based magazine writer, who’s called in for jury duty. At first his main concern is attending to his very pregnant wife (Zoey Deutch). But once he’s selected he realizes he has a much bigger problem. The case concerns a young woman, Kendall Carter (Francesca Eastwood), who was killed after a night out at a local roadhouse with her boyfriend, James Sythe (Gabriel Basso). James, on trial, seems like an obvious suspect: He has a criminal past, and they fought in public on the night of her death.
There’s just one glaring issue: As Justin hears the facts of the trial, he realizes he’s the one who is actually responsible for Kendall’s demise. Distraught and distracted by a text from his spouse, he hit Kendall with his car on a rain-soaked road after leaving the same bar. He assumed he had struck a deer and kept heading home after seeing no victim in the darkness.
The high drama of the film comes when it’s time to deliberate. To most everyone else in that room, it seems obvious that James is responsible. No-nonsense prosecutor Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette) has made a convincing argument, selling both James’ guilt and her own competence as she runs for district attorney. But Justin sows doubt among his fellow jurors, partly out of altruism—he doesn’t want an innocent man to be wrongly convicted—yet mostly out of self-preservation.
Hoult sells this. The British actor has become one of Hollywood’s go-to guys for playing squirrelly weirdos in the likes of Mad Max: Fury Road and The Menu, and he brings that energy to his turn as an ostensibly normal man caught up in an impossible situation. He has a perpetually clammy sheen, and he expertly keeps your sympathies shifting, his nervous eyes darting whenever he’s in a scene. Is he someone who made a terrible mistake or someone cravenly willing to sacrifice another human life for his own?
Eastwood elegantly threads Justin’s anxiety throughout the movie as he flashes back to key moments in his protagonist’s life, letting us know who this man really is in slow drips rather than all at once. There are no action scenes, but you’re kept on the edge of your seat wondering just how far this person is willing to go to save himself. And though there are multiple shots of scales of justice (in case you didn’t know what the themes were), Eastwood tackles the material from a point of skepticism that bleeds into cynicism.
This isn’t all to say that Juror #2 isn’t sometimes silly or unrealistic. But engaging in all of its absurdity is part of the pleasure. It allows the film to act as something of a parable: What would you do in this situation? And, depending on your choice, would you be able to live with yourself? These questions don’t hold the same weight when you’re distractedly streaming a movie in your living room.
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