Clint Eastwood can’t seem to get arrested with Juror #2, which Warner Bros are quietly sticking on the back burner, even though it’s his finest film in years. The moral maze of the premise is tautly negotiated. Shrewd casting helps, as does Eastwood’s trump suit: a forensic seriousness of purpose. Grappling with the mechanisms of justice and the workings of a lone conscience, he puts both in the scales, and no one’s off the hook.
Only when he’s already in the jury box for a murder trial does Justin (Nicholas Hoult), a recovered addict and expectant father in Georgia, come to the skin-crawling realisation that he probably ought to be the one in the dock. The roughneck defendant (Gabriel Basso) had a public spat with his girlfriend (Francesca Eastwood), the night before her body was discovered in a roadside creek. But Justin was at the very same bar, and hit something on his drive home, which he’d always assumed was a deer.
This debut script from Jonathan Abrams is 12 Angry Men with a knife-twist. What if the only holdout weren’t Henry Fonda’s bleeding heart, but the burning guilt of an alternate suspect? Justin isn’t sure he’s to blame, but his sickening recollections certainly carve out some reasonable doubt.
This role is a world away from the funny, facile types Hoult usually plays with no sweat. Forcing him into a tight spot where he’s answering chiefly to himself, this is a pure perspiration zone, and he’s excellent.
Basso’s character is easy to condemn. The other jurors want the process over, to get back to their lives. The prosecutor (a top-notch Toni Collette) is counting on such haste, plus, needs the conviction to advance her career as a DA. Her motives aren’t selfless; her idea of justice cuts corners; her assumptions may be skewed. Collette does soul-searching better than anyone, and brings us to parallel epiphanies that tighten the noose.
At 94, Eastwood isn’t interested in pushing the boat out stylistically. It’s a comforting throwback to 1990s courtroom-drama aesthetics – perhaps too comforting, like a return to Grisham-land. A few plot points are jarringly convenient.
But the plus column is much bigger. He has pointedly made a moral thriller without obvious villains, and considers accountability with no criminal intent as the final test of justice. The last scene – one of Eastwood’s punchiest endings – is a wordless classic.
12A cert, 114 min. In cinemas from Friday November 1
