Vague Visages’ Juror #2 review contains minor spoilers. Clint Eastwood’s 2024 movie features Nicholas Hoult, Toni Collette and J.K. Simmons. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews.

Juror #2 predicates itself on a number of simple dichotomies, each of which provides another layer to the film’s dissection of the ideals and values at the heart of the American legal system. A series of mirror images, many of them contradictory, combine to say something more meaningful than the sum of its parts. Juror #2’s  director, the now 94-year-old Clint Eastwood, is also part of that series of contradictory mirror images: an icon of American cinema whose most iconic role arrived in an Italian production, and whose work as a director has done much to examine, break down and rebuild notions of masculinity and American cultural value systems over the years, many of which the actor/filmmaker came to embody in the first place.

Eastwood’s political views — a streak of conservative libertarianism that’s proudly independent but also outspokenly anti-Trump — forms a function in his filmmaking. The temptation is to draw a direct line between the politics of his films with that of the director, something which suits today’s heightened era of social media moralizing but doesn’t actually work in practice (it’s worth pointing out that Eastwood has never taken a writing credit on any film). 

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Yet what makes Eastwood’s filmography interesting, especially as he gets ever older, is his capacity for self-reflection. The filmmaker’s best-directed efforts are those which examine traditional conservative values with a keen eye, something which benefits from Eastwood being “on the inside” as it were. Perhaps that’s the staunch belief in law and order (Richard Jewell, 2019), Wild West mythology (Unforgiven, 1992) or male self-dependence (Gran Torino, 2008). In each film, Eastwood examines these ideals and finds them wanting against the reality. Onscreen, this iconography has long been presented as American perfection; reality’s reflection is a lot uglier.

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So it is with Juror #2. It’s the story of Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult), a man dreading jury duty in what seems an open-and-shut murder trial, with James Michael Sythe (Gabriel Basso) accused of killing his girlfriend, Kendall Carter (Francesca Eastwood), after a drunken argument and dumping her body in a muddy creek on a stormy night. However, Kemp quickly realizes he might be the killer, having hit what he thought was a deer on what was a dark stormy night right on that very same day. He is then faced then with a moral dilemma: confess and incriminate himself, send an innocent man to jail or try his best to convince his fellow jurors that James is innocent without showing his hand.

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It’s the setup for a juicy potboiler legal thriller, and Juror #2 certainly delivers on this front. Jonathan A. Abrams’ script gives the starry cast plenty to chew on, while the pacing of additional information is sharply handled. Eastwood’s stripped-back directing style — few set-ups, little showiness or ostentatious stylings — works wonders in a plot-dense and wordy film such as this, allowing the actors space to flex their skills.

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What truly elevates Juror #2 from just a basic legal potboiler to an exquisite late-career work is its attention to moral detail. Each of the major characters face a moral quandary that motivates their actions; their decisions are flawed, and the only time they “do the right thing” in the traditional sense is when they feel their own comfort and value system won’t be broached in doing so. Mirror images dominate Juror #2. The accused, Sythe, has gang associations in his past and a history of violence, alcoholism and substance abuse, all of which the prosecution pounces on, even as the defendant describes how hard he’s worked to get better. Meanwhile, the protagonist Justin is a recovering alcoholic with past trauma undercutting his relationship with his heavily pregnant wife, Allison (Zoey Deutch). He is presented as nice and decent (Hoult’s baby blue eyes certainly help), while the accused is gruff, muscled and tattooed. Yet the two men are only a few decisions away from swapping places. 

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Likewise, the two lawyers — the public defender Eric Resnick (Chris Messina) and prosecutor Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette) — deal with the same predicament, as the standard mirroring of the two sides of court is complicated by the prosecution’s political ambitions, in the running for DA on a platform of protecting women from abusers, for which this case becomes a cause célèbre. Killebrew’s growing sense that all might not be right with her argument is undercut by her political positioning. Juror #2 seems to ask, “How much of the law and the legal system itself is just a performance?”

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Collette’s slightly ridiculous Deep South accent (the only one in a film set in Chatham County, Georgia) could be read as a metatextual wink towards her character’s essentially performative nature, painting herself into a corner from which stepping back would be career suicide. Is she prepared to do that? That, too, is mirrored back in the Kemp family, who performs the role of the loving husband-and-wife that centers the nuclear family, the bedrock of Americana, and they too find themselves painted into a corner (Juror #2 spends plenty of time detailing the fractures that live in their relationship). Are any of these people willing to make the sacrifice to ensure justice and its preference for black-and-white guilty/not guilty verdicts runs its course?

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Much of the middle-third of Juror #2 takes place during the jury deliberations, with Kemp attempting to convince his fellow jurors that Sythe is innocent, in a clear allusion to Sidney Lumet’s classic 12 Angry Men (1957). A variety of social positions open up here. There are those with some level of skin in the game: the retired cop who knows from experience how criminal justice tunnels visions towards the wrong man, the social worker who’s seen first-hand what gang membership does to communities. 

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The irony is that poor jury selections by the lawyers and the judge allowed them into the process. There are those with no reason to be there: the bored stoner teenager, the pre-med student, the housewife unlucky enough to have been on three juries. That they are disinterested is precisely why they make good jurors, says the judge at the start, and yet it’s also their disinterest that risks mishandling justice, having to be convinced that the prospect of a man’s life imprisonment is worth more than half an hour of their deliberations.

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And just as everyone takes on their assigned role in Juror #2, the legal system functions as a director, casting people as juror, lawyer, judge, bailiff and giving them instructions to act. The legal system working as intended is one of the defining values underpinning American ideals, left or right. Eastwood scrutinizes that legal system to find that it is more interested in appearing to work as intended — the performance of a functioning system is more important than the functioning system itself. In sum then, Juror #2 is deliciously ambiguous, with many of the final conclusions left to the audience. But it is also a brilliant dissection of the flaws and limits of the justice system, which functions only so far as the values of those who live within it comfortably go unchallenged. And so Juror #2 is one of the finer cinematic works of 2024.

Fedor Tot (@redrightman) is a Yugoslav-born, Wales-raised freelance film critic and editor, specializing in the cinema of the ex-Yugoslav region. Beyond that, he also has an interest in film history, particularly in the way film as a business affects and decides the function of film as an art.

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