Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood, 2024)

[aox]

Clint Eastwood's final directorial film will be "Juror #2". The story is said to follow a juror on a murder trial who realizes that he may have caused the victim’s death and must grapple with the dilemma of whether to manipulate the jury to save himself, or reveal the truth and turn himself in.

He's basically filming the Simpsons episode, "The Boy Who Knew Too Much" but probably less funny.

[knives]

I doubt it’s his final film, but given recent issues merely his last with WB.

[brundlefly]

Clint Eastwood's final directorial film will be "Juror #2". The story is said to follow a juror on a murder trial who realizes that he may have caused the victim’s death and must grapple with the dilemma of whether to manipulate the jury to save himself, or reveal the truth and turn himself in.

He's basically filming the Simpsons episode, "The Boy Who Knew Too Much" but probably less funny.

Trailer.

[Maladroit Aggregator]

Clint Eastwood's final directorial film will be "Juror #2". The story is said to follow a juror on a murder trial who realizes that he may have caused the victim’s death and must grapple with the dilemma of whether to manipulate the jury to save himself, or reveal the truth and turn himself in.

He's basically filming the Simpsons episode, "The Boy Who Knew Too Much" but probably less funny.

Trailer.

Sounds like a laughably contrived premise. Surely there are more convincing ways to examine similar moral dilemmas

[pistolwink]

Sounds like a laughably contrived premise. Surely there are more convincing ways to examine similar moral dilemmas

Are you familiar with popular cinema?

[Maladroit Aggregator]

Sounds like a laughably contrived premise. Surely there are more convincing ways to examine similar moral dilemmas

Are you familiar with popular cinema?

Only PornHub, where I see more believable narratives than this sort of thing

[brundlefly]

Am choosing to believe this a dark comedy about a man who suddenly realizes he's in a relationship with a Zoey Deutch character and will confess to any available crime to be locked away from that.

Shocked someone in marketing did not flag the title at some stage and suggest Hoult sit somewhere else in the box. Fodder for itchy headline writers. "Warners Drops #2 into 700 Theaters." "Critics Smear..." etc etc

[MichaelB]

Shocked someone in marketing did not flag the title at some stage and suggest Hoult sit somewhere else in the box. Fodder for itchy headline writers. "Warners Drops #2 into 700 Theaters." "Critics Smear..." etc etc

I think that says more about you than it does about the film. My own eye and ear for innuendo could hardly be keener, but I've been familiar with this title for several months now and my mind never once went there.

[brundlefly]

Could well do! Though I doubt I'm the only Butthead on the internet. Most may be too distracted by the terrible premise.

Anyway, you're welcome!

[bearcuborg]

Clint Eastwood's final directorial film will be "Juror #2". The story is said to follow a juror on a murder trial who realizes that he may have caused the victim’s death and must grapple with the dilemma of whether to manipulate the jury to save himself, or reveal the truth and turn himself in.

He's basically filming the Simpsons episode, "The Boy Who Knew Too Much" but probably less funny.

Just the opposite, Clint’s latest is often hilarious. It’s also unbelievably thrilling in a way Nolan wishes he was. One of Clint’s best ever films. Hoult gives a performance worthy of Anthony Perkins.

[pistolwink]

It's an insult (to Clint and to audiences) that this wasn't opened wider. Didn't even play my metro area of > 1 million.

[therewillbeblus]

I guess I'll be the lone dissenter. I didn't find the central dilemma very compelling, and everything just plays out as expected once you find out what's going on like fifteen minutes in. It's a competently made film, but never aspires to be more than one you'd catch flipping channels on TV on a Sunday afternoon. That's totally fine, but the effusive praise baffles me

[bearcuborg]

For me the performances of Hoult and Collette elevate this movie above a Lifetime TV movie. The garage scene between Hoult and Zoey Deutch is a powerful piece of direction, Hoult seems to channel Lon Chaney as his face changes before us. And there isn't a bad performance in the entire piece either, everyone seems to get their moment on camera. Collette and Messina work wonderful together. I wouldn't be shocked if this movie garners several Oscar nominations. Clint interweaves the flashbacks masterfully and builds up the tension to a doozy of an ending.

One of the Naked Gun movies used this great promotional line: "If you only see one movie this year, you need to get out more." Perhaps that's me - if it's not an older movie, I'm probably not going to the theater. But I found this to be a stellar experience. It would make a fun double bill with something like Flight, or Gone Girl.

[pistolwink]

This quietly expanded to more markets in North America, so it might be playing in a theater near you even if you weren't on the original or even the first revised list of bookings.

[domino harvey]

Whit Stillman has posted on Twitter about this movie like a hundred times, so it has its high profile fans!

[Roscoe]

It's a competently made film, but never aspires to be more than one you'd catch flipping channels on TV on a Sunday afternoon. That's totally fine, but the effusive praise baffles me

A handy summation of Eastwood's entire career output.

[pistolwink]

Do you really think films like Bird and Unforgiven suggest a filmmaker entirely without artistic ambitions? I'm not an Eastwood cultist, but c'mon.

[Roscoe]

Do you really think films like Bird and Unforgiven suggest a filmmaker entirely without artistic ambitions? I'm not an Eastwood cultist, but c'mon.

Fair enough. The aspirations are there, sort of. But the works never live up to those aspirations. It's Basic Cable Minimum Competence all the way.

[MichaelB]

Those two films definitely do live up to those aspirations (in fact, Unforgiven is pretty much the only time my own pick of that year's best film was in sync with the Academy's), and I reckon most of us could easily cite another half-dozen.

[knives]

Do you really think films like Bird and Unforgiven suggest a filmmaker entirely without artistic ambitions? I'm not an Eastwood cultist, but c'mon.

Fair enough. The aspirations are there, sort of. But the works never live up to those aspirations. It's Basic Cable Minimum Competence all the way.

Because when I think of basic cable I think films in Japanese.

[Roscoe]

Those two films definitely do live up to those aspirations (in fact, Unforgiven is pretty much the only time my own pick of that year's best film was in sync with the Academy's), and I reckon most of us could easily cite another half-dozen.

As should be obvious to even the most casual observer by now -- Mileage Is Gonna Vary. One person's masterpiece is another person's by-the-numbers piece of conventional hackwork. Glad you and others dig on the Eastwood.

[DimitriL]

I’m someone who generally runs fairly meh on Eastwood’s stuff, but I can’t imagine any universe where Unforgiven - a film that savagely torn apart both the genre and Eastwood’s image - is considered conventional hackwork. But yes, YMMV.

[MichaelB]

As should be obvious to even the most casual observer by now -- Mileage Is Gonna Vary. One person's masterpiece is another person's by-the-numbers piece of conventional hackwork. Glad you and others dig on the Eastwood.

Unforgiven is not "conventional hackwork" by any stretch of the imagination, and neither is it "by the numbers". Quite the reverse, I'd argue.

Assuming you've seen it at all, dare I suggest that your observation might have been a bit too casual?

[diamonds]

Do you really think films like Bird and Unforgiven suggest a filmmaker entirely without artistic ambitions? I'm not an Eastwood cultist, but c'mon.

Indeed. My first thought was, "...or Flags of Our Fathers, or Letters from Iwo Jima, or White Hunter, Black Heart, or Million Dollar Baby, or The Bridges of Madison County, or..."

I'm admittedly unsure where the line is between what constitutes a simple admirer of a director and a "cultist"; I should hope it's more than, "cultist: passionate enthusiast of a director I do not like or care strongly for." So at the risk of sounding like one of these cultists, I don't hesitate to call Eastwood a master, and when I exited Juror #2 I thought that if this ends up being his last film, he just might have gone out with a masterpiece. Eastwood's films have often had a harsh Langian side to them, and this is the film where it's perhaps most explicit. There are shades of those stark late Lang films in the subject and the presentation; Eastwood has always been a pleasingly unadorned filmmaker, but there's a clarity to the images and to the light that seems new here, especially for a filmmaker so prone to shadows (and there are certainly plenty of those here too).

Luc Moullet wrote that Truffaut had one of the most complete bodies of work in cinema, and I might say the same of Eastwood as well, which is partly what makes studying his work so rewarding for many auteurists. One effect of this completeness: when a film as poised as Juror #2 comes along, it helps make sense of some of the misfires. I've never been a fan of High Plains Drifter, a rather coarse Leone pastiche, but I'm not sure if Mystic River, a masterpiece and to my mind one of the great American films of this young century, would exist without it. Likewise, Juror #2 bears a profound connection to the awkward and somewhat clunky True Crime, rearranging its elements and deepening its themes in startling, destabilizing ways.

I saw the film on a weekday afternoon with an audience of a little over 30 people, who all sat rapt—I genuinely can't remember a more respectful and engaged audience in my recent theatergoing experience. I thought of John Cope's post about a similar experience with Unforgiven, which I will excerpt because it contains a succinct, perceptive observation about Eastwood's methods that are surely on display here:

Eastwood got it right in Unforgiven; couch it all in the language of recognizable, familiar genre and you can affect many in ways they won't be able to immediately process. I've never seen an audience walk out of a picture in such a mournful procession as during that first weekend for Unforgiven.

In the run-up to that final cut—as perfect an ending as Eastwood has ever executed; as smooth, sharp, inevitable, and abrupt as a guillotine—one could feel the tension in the theater, and it did not abate in the darkness of the credits. (Suddenly: the void.)

One small moment among many that I liked (and which should give lie to the idea that Eastwood is a thoughtlessly efficient craftsman): a transition in which Eastwood cuts from kids lining up to trick-or-treat to adults in the security queue in the courthouse. In this film about (among other things) fatherhood, a subtle ripple that recalls Eastwood's insights in A Perfect World: that the realms of childhood and adulthood are not as separate as we might want them to be, and that children will learn and learn well from those who raise them, and will become them. Within this supposedly conventional courtroom thriller—which might superficially resemble a slew of John Grisham thrillers but is ultimately worlds away from them—lies a thundering treatise on moral expediency, culpability, and—as ever for this filmmaker—damnation, one which speaks quite directly to the world in which we live or want to make.

But hey, it could be my cult robes are too tight

[Mr Sausage]

Eastwood's output is inconsistent, and work like Absolute Power, True Crime, and Blood Work probably merit Roscoe's lable.

But Unforgiven? Like everyone's said above, that's a masterpiece whose grasp is more than equal to its reach. High Plains Drifter and The Outlaw Josey Wales easily distinguish themselves in the field of post-classical revisionist Westerns. Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby are both very effective dramas, the first a better Dennis Lehane adaptation than Scorsese managed, and the second an un-selfconscious throwback to traditional Hollywood melodrama.

And what about Letters From Iwo Jima? It's excellent, indeed good enough even to redeem the banalities of Flags of Our Fathers. The early-to-mid 2000s were rife with war films full of machismo and muscular action: Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers, 300, Enemy at the Gates, Windtalkers--and here is one of America's biggest action heroes making a thoughtful, melancholy duo that emphasizes humanity over carnage, and that gives both sides an equal share in the story instead of making one a faceless enemy to be mown down. Has any Hollywood filmmaker chosen to explore the other side to the degree Eastwood does here? Letters from Iwo Jima might even be the best Hollywood war film from the period (some close competition from Jarhead and Rescue Dawn, tho')

Then there's stuff like White Hunter, Black Heart, a movie not equal to its aspirations and yet more interesting as a failure than a lot of more successful movies. And Sudden Impact is the most fascinating entry in the Dirty Harry series, and not at all the one you would've expected Eastwood to direct given his Republican bonafides, ie. he chose a female power fantasy over, say, The Enforcer's straight-forward sexist response to the woman's movement.

YMMV and other cliches aside, Roscoe's criticisms are an inadequate response.