★★★★★

You 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 irrelevant 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 character’s actions be so admirable if the villains in this movie weren’t an ‘evil’ gun manufacturer?” If the plaintiffs were suing some small businessman over a “slip-and-fall” incident, would he seem quite so “heroic” then?

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). The gun manufacturer is represented by an attorney named Durwood Cable (Bruce Davison), who employs Rankin Fitch (Gene Hackman), a notoriously amoral “jury consultant” with equipment and staff that resembles the Pentagon War Room.

Before we go any further, I have to ask: where the hell did author John Grisham come up with the names of these characters? These do not sound like names real people have. Maybe there is a real Wendell Rohr, Durwood Cable or Rankin Fitch somewhere in the world, but they still sound like names from a bad novel. Not having read Grisham’s book, I can’t say if it is was good or bad, but these are certainly names from a bad movie.

Meanwhile, a prospective juror named Nicholas Easter (Cusack) seems to be doing everything he can to get off the jury but succeeds mostly in pissing off the judge (Bruce McGill), who practically forces both sides to accept Easter as a juror. Once the jury is seated, however, it becomes clear that Easter was manipulating the judge to make sure he did get on the jury and is working with a mysterious woman named Marlee (Rachel Weisz). Through Marlee, Easter sends messages to both sides, offering to sway the verdict in their direction for $15 million.

Rohr is, of course, too noble and pure to bite and Fitch is furious that someone is trying to play him at his own game. The middle part of the movie concerns itself with Easter manipulating the jury to fulfill Marlee’s predictions, to prove they can deliver on what they say the can do. Meanwhile, Fitch desperately tries to determine which juror is behind the offer. He settles on Easter, mainly because the man seems to have no past, which automatically makes Fitch suspicious.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 17th, 2006 at 7:42 am and is filed under Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Paul knew you were going to say that.