Phil Biedron, left, Nicholas Hoult, Drew Scheid and Rebecca Koon in a scene from “Juror #2” 2024. IMDb photo

You are about to watch another Clint Eastwood movie. Of course. Don’t take my word for it, watch it, watch it twice. But try to stay awake.

Remember that this is the guy who made all those “Dirty Harry” detective movies and the greatest Western ever, 1992’s “Unforgiven.” He’s always been closer to my heart than even Tommy Lee Jones.

We can’t count on this slow, quiet story to be the great Clint’s last. He’s 94 and still shooting. Clint is capable of anything. But his great career may be about to end here. What’s sadder than that is that this one has a great cast of actors like J.K. Simmons in a throw-away part as an ex-detective who owns a florist shop.

We get the ever-present Kiefer Sutherland and the classic Amy Aquino, a great character actor as a judge with no great lines. But we are stuck with a C movie about a young guy named Justin (a very dull Nicholas Hoult) with a nice home and a lovely pregnant wife (Zoey Deutch) who lost twins in her last pregnancy. Justin writes travel articles and carries his four-year AA badge on his key chain.

Wouldn’t you know that Justin gets himself picked for the trial of James Michael Sythe (Gabriel Basso) who allegedly ran down his wife in the rain on a country road after they had a fight, the same road where poor Justin was driving that night and hit something he thought was a deer. Haven’t we all done the same exact thing?

Now, sitting in the jury box, hearing the case, Justin suspects something familiar is afoot. Perhaps the deer he hit wasn’t Bambi’s mother, but may have been the dead wife.

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Well, how about that? Now he’s on the jury that is going to send a guy to the jailhouse for hitting that deer, I mean his dead blonde wife.

You can see, Lucy, we have a big problem on our hands.

Justin, stupidly, goes to his AA sponsor and tells his story. The sponsor, not a Catholic priest, tells Justin to keep his mouth shut or he will go to the jailhouse for life, because they will assume he was drinking even though he was not. Yes, they do things like that.

Into this dilemma comes the prosecuting attorney, Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette, who is always good in whatever she finds herself in). She sees Justin sweating in the jury box and gets information about cars involved in accidents that night, and slowly grows suspicious. Well, not all of Toni’s characters are that smart.

So there we are, the audience, wondering why Justin gabbed to the AA sponsor like he’s his Catholic priest with an oath of silence instead of his wife, and why our Justin appears to let the innocent husband get convicted and sent to prison for life, without even a smidge of regret or an least an eye tic?

All this “thriller” without the thrill comes to a head in the final scene when Killebrew comes to the door of Justin’s home, where he stands looking surprised, like she’s selling Tupperware.

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At blackout, she stands before him with just a look of “Can we talk, Justin?”

My thought is to ask Mr. Eastwood “Can we talk, Clint?”

“Juror #2” is now streaming on Max.

 

J.P. Devine of Waterville is a former stage and screen actor.

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