‘Juror #2’: Clint Eastwood’s Courtroom Drama Stretches Credulity Beyond A Reasonable Doubt [Review]

You’d be forgiven if you didn’t know Clint Eastwood has a film in the running for awards this year called “Juror #2,” since Warner Bros. released it to less than 50 theaters in the U.S. Some may think this is an injustice, that Eastwood’s latest masterpiece — which will stream on Max later this month — has been suppressed as Hollywood prepares to put him out to pasture. Maybe that’s true. Maybe the film, particularly its script, is just very bad.

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“Juror #2” opens on Justin (Nicholas Hoult) and Ally (Zoey Deutch) as they celebrate the upcoming arrival of their first child. It’s quite inconvenient, then, when Justin is selected to serve on the jury for a murder trial. Enter prosecutor and hopeful district attorney elect Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette) and likable public defender Eric Resnick (Chris Messina). The former is determined to skewer the defendant for the alleged death of his girlfriend, thus securing her election; the latter is convinced the state has no sufficient proof. When Justin learns the details of the case, which may actually incriminate him, he must decide whether to tell the truth and risk his family or obstruct true justice.

In his debut feature, screenwriter Jonathan Abrams raises an interesting moral dilemma, to be sure, but Justin’s quandary is founded on pure nonsense. We’ve all heard of major murder cases that were gravely mismanaged, but the events of “Juror #2” stretch credulity beyond its limits. The prosecution’s case is so tenuous that it’s unclear how their arguments ever made it to a jury trial. Halfway through the film, a juror played by J. K. Simmons reveals that he’s actually a former police detective — a detail that surely no jury selection process would miss. To believe Justin’s potential role in this murder, one would also have to believe that the coroner assigned to this case was born yesterday. “Juror #2” lampoons true crime followers in the form of one fangirling juror, but anyone who’s listened to a few good podcasts will exit the theater scratching their head.

Justin’s fellow jurors also seem to be completely unaware of what serving on a jury actually entails. Until Justin speaks up, burdened by his conscience, they’re all happy to turn in a verdict without even pausing to consider the evidence. When Justin reminds them about that whole pesky “beyond a reasonable doubt” thing, swaying some jurors into a less didactic perspective, a few of his peers become openly hostile. Sure, people have kids and lives — Justin has an enormously pregnant wife at home, himself — but the level of vitriol that some of these jurors have for their role is so shallowly explained that it feels bizarre, a perfunctory injection of tension.

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Second only to this film’s mismanagement of the criminal justice system is its depiction of sobriety. Justin is four years sober, and his recovery in Alcoholics Anonymous is a major part of his character, yet some of that program’s main tenets — like owning up to your mistakes and making amends — barely factor into his trajectory. In fact, the one guy he seems to know from AA (played, for some reason, by Kiefer Sutherland), encourages him most strongly to cover his own ass.

Pair such glaring plot holes and overwrought drama with humdrum visuals and you’ve got an uninspiring movie indeed. While it’s nice to see Toni Colette and Chris Messina face off both in and out of the courtroom and Zoey Deutch gives a strong dramatic performance as Ally, even the best acting can’t make “Juror #2” make sense. In the wake of such stunning, thought-provoking legal dramas as “Anatomy of a Fall” and “Dark Waters,” this paint-by-numbers proceeding is practically criminal. [D]

“Juror #2” starts streaming December 20 on Max.