Spoiler Alert: In the end, Rohr refuses to pay while Fitch agrees. Nick and Marlee deliver the verdict to the plaintiffs anyway. It turns out that Nick and Marlee are not the heroes’ real names and that they lost loved ones in a similar tragedy and a similar lawsuit failed due to Fitch’s work for the defendents. Their efforts to subvert the jury in this trial have been an elaborate, morally questionable and wholly implausible scheme to get revenge against Fitch. They use his agreement to pay to blackmail him into getting out of the business of jury consulting.

So here we have a “hero” who lies about his identity to become a juror in a case where, by all rights, he should have been excused because of his involvement in a similar case. He solicits bribes while he deliberately works to manipulate the jury to decide in a direction the opposite from which it was apparently leaning. To top it off, the whole effort was part of a blackmail scheme. I’d like to see a sequel to Runaway Jury where the Nick Easter character is put on trial for the multiple felonies he committed in this movie. It would also the show the poor widow losing her judgement on appeal once the jury tampering is exposed.

The movie includes considerable changes from the original John Grisham novel. The suit in the book was against a tobacco company, but since Michael Mann’s The Insider had already covered that territory, they switched it to a gun manufacturer. Apparently, in the novel the motives of the protagonists were also something less upright and pure. (Since Mr. Grisham is an attorney, and thus an officer of the court, I would certainly hope that he’d take a dim view of the shenanigans in this film.)

The filmmakers also make the executives of the gun manufacturer into such rapacious, moustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash caricatures that it quickly becomes hard to take this movie seriously, even before John Cusack’s character gets his plot into gear.

The film never asks the really obvious question: Why should the gun manufacturer be held responsible for the actions of a person they had no connection to? They were not the reason the daytrader was distraught nor were they the reason he was unhinged enough to take out his frustration in such a homicidal fashion. Had the killer driven a Chevy Suburban through the brokerage office and killed the woman’s husband that way, could the film have dealt with suing General Motors and still been taken seriously?

Should the killer really be any less culpable for his action just because he was holding a trigger instead of a steering wheel?

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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 is inexplicably aroused by Jackie Chan movies.