Runaway Jury (2003)
By PaulYou think your average juror is King Solomon? No, he’s a roofer with a mortgage. He wants to go home and sit in his Barcalounger and let the cable TV wash over him. And this man doesn’t give a single, solitary droplet of shit about truth, justice or your American way.
Be forewarned, while I normally avoid giving out plot spoilers in my reviews, I feel like it’s necessary this time to fully get my opinion across.
Runaway Jury is probably one of the more morally bankrupt mainstream movies I’ve seen. It stacks the deck completely in favor of one side in order to justify the deplorable actions of the film’s hero, which amount to no less than subverting the justice system to suit his own agenda. The fact that he is, in effect, giving the film’s villain a taste of his own medicine is completely irrelevent when our protagonist is also sinking to the same level or lower.
The question that anyone in the audience should be asking is: “Would the John Cusack
The simple truth is that this film endorses a wholly immoral course of action by its main character and doesn’t play fair with its subject matter. Even if I supported the goals of the lawsuit, the actions of the so-called heroes of this movie are still beyond the pale.
The quality of the filmmaking is high and the performances are universally fine, as you would expect from a cast of this caliber. Quality of craft, however, does not excuse this film from its failings.
Runaway Jury revolves around a lawsuit against a gun manufacturer, brought by the widow of a stock broker whose office was shot up by a distraught man who had lost all of his money daytrading, using a gun made by the defendants. She’s represented by a white knight crusader of an attorney named Wendell Rohr (Dustin Hoffman
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About the author:
Paul's cat has violent mood swings between ennui and apathy.
