Everybody hates jury duty but imagine being part of a trial for a crime that you committed.

It’s pretty disgraceful to think that after the long-standing relationship between Clint Eastwood and Warner Brothers Studios, one of their brothers would not do more to Market and hype what is supposed to be the final film that Clint Eastwood directs in his career. The word is that Warner Brothers wanted this film to be exclusive to HBO Max.

Ultimately, they decided to give the movie a limited release instead of a wide release which many deemed as disrespectful to a filmmaker with the legacy of Clint Eastwood. It can be summed up that Clint Eastwood is a dying breed of filmmaker who is still making adult dramas from major studios in 2024. 

As the rest of the industry wants to shift towards comic book movies and overplayed sequels,  films that have a story to tell do not draw the eyes of the multi-billion dollar corporations masquerading as film studios in 2024. That leads us to the plot of  Eastwood’s final film, Juror #2.

The film stars Nicholas Holt and Zoey Deutch As a young couple embarking on starting a family. Nicholas Plays Justin Kemp Who is a recovering alcoholic Who just got called in to do jury duty. The case is about a woman who got into a public altercation with her boyfriend at a bar and afterward was found murdered and left in a ditch near a bridge where the altercation took place. 

Most of the jury views it as an open and shut case against the ex-boyfriend until Justin starts to put the pieces together and realizes that he was involved in a car accident a year earlier where he thought he ran over a deer yet never found the body. Justin then realizes that he was responsible for the woman’s death a year ago and tries to convince the jury that the ex-boyfriend is innocent without revealing that he was the one responsible for her death.

As Hollywood sits around and asks themselves why they’re in the position where the industry does not make as much money as it wants to,  the simple answer is that the industry at large does not Market films of the quality of Juror #2. The film is a brilliant Courthouse drama, That puts the audience in the position of knowing the twist and reacting to it before our characters have the full knowledge themselves.

The character of Justin Kemp is a man trying to move forward and make the right decisions yet his past comes back to bite him in a big way.  Now he must struggle between taking responsibility for an action that he caused. Even if that means losing everything that he has built up to this point including the possibility of a family.

The film creates an incredible moral dilemma and Justin tries to work around this by being the one voice of Innocence for a man on trial for murder. The problem is Justin cannot prove why he is innocent while revealing the fact that Justin was the one responsible for the woman’s death. 

This creates conflict with the other jurors who view Justin as a hindrance to their guilty verdict and the end of the case. The character displays an incredible level of selfishness as he knows for a certainty he’s looking at the imprisonment of an innocent man but because he doesn’t want to take responsibility for his actions he will allow this man to look at death being fessed up.

Eastwood does a great job of having the characters around Justin begin to figure out that something isn’t quite right with  Justin even if their convictions haven’t changed. Juror #2 is one of the most intense films of the year from a storytelling aspect, Nicholas Hoult excels in one of the best performances of his career in a year that will define and elevate his career.

Much like Last year’s Oppenheimer, the supporting cast boasts of the best all-around performances of the year from actors including J. K. Simmons, Toni Collette, Cedric Yarbrough, and Keifer Sutherland. From top to bottom, Juror #2 is one of the best movies of 2024 and it’s a damn shame that Warner Brothers limited the amount of eyes that would see this outside going to their streaming service. 

Without question, Clint Eastwood’s final directing performance is worthy of the year’s cinematic Awards.

4.5/5 

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