BEFORE: Let's talk about things happening at the right time - even tragic things can appear to do so. Gene Hackman died a couple of months ago and he was retired, he hadn't made a movie in quite some time. Suddenly this film (his next-to-last) started popping up on several of the streaming services AND cable at the same time, which is unusual - but he was in the news or channels wanted to pay homage to him or whatever. And it's one of those films with an enormous cast, so as soon as I put it on my list it created new linking opportunities, across the board - so it wasn't long at all before I was able to schedule it, as it proved to be JUST the thing I needed to get to something big for Movie #5,000, which will be here tomorrow.
It's not just big actors, it's about character actors, the "Hey, it's THAT guy" guys. And gals. I've gotten to know many of them over the last almost-5,000 films, and I've used them as reliable links, again and again. Take a peek down below at the cast here, they went DEEP on character actors from the early 00's - Celia Weston, sure, and Cliff Curtis and Bruce McGill, but also Joe Chrest and Douglas M. Griffin and Gary Grubbs! Bill Nunn and Luis Guzman, Mike Pniewski and Rhoda Griffis! Leland Orser! Rusty Schwimmer! David Jensen! Orlando Jones! I can't wait to figure out where I've seen everyone in this cast before, again and again!
Carol Sutton carries over from "Eve's Bayou".
THE PLOT: A juror, a lawyer and a mysterious woman stand in the way of a man trying to manipulate an explosive trial.
AFTER: Well, I suppose when you start a year with "Anatomy of a Fall", you should probably expect a bunch of films about trials, right? Then in the last week of January came "Dark Waters", "The Burial" and "Pain Hustlers", which were all about trials, and hell, even the Joker got put on trial in "Folie a Deux" that same month. In February there was even a rom-com that involved a lawsuit against a dating app company, it was called "Love, Guaranteed". Then March and April brought "Gotti", "Rules of Engagement" (with a court-martial) and "Till", and now we find ourselves here.
In the Grisham novel this legal thriller is based on, the lawsuit was against the tobacco industry, representing how the tide kind of turned against the cigarette companies after they enjoyed several decades of selling a deadly product. But then the movie "The Insider" came out in 1999, so when someone then tried to adapt this book into a movie, it made sense to change the target of the lawsuit to a gun manufacturer. Another industry which has been allowed to slide by in the U.S. for too long without being held responsible for its product.
And as you might imagine, the gun (or tobacco) manufacturers don't exactly play fairly - they've both got enough money to stack the deck by hiring jury selection experts to figure out which jurors might be more sympathetic to them. "Runaway Jury" kind of takes this to the extreme, depicting an armada of photographers and detectives to somehow start researching the potential jurors on the DAY they get their jury duty notices in the mail. Is this even possible? Did we even have this kind of computing power in 2003, to immediately start databases on the hundreds (?) of people who would be on the juror rolls in New Orleans? (Yes, we're still in Louisiana tonight, the locale also carries over from "Eve's Bayou"...)
Right, I forgot about jury selection - each lawyer at a trial gets a certain number of "challenges" to allow jurors to be removed from the pool, and they don't usually have to give a reason - in fact it's probably better that they don't - based on what they observe about each juror and a couple of quick questions they get to ask. But why wait for jury selection? Why not start the process sooner, so the staff of 30 (?) people working out of a warehouse somewhere has enough time to research the public records of each possible juror, search the public records for any scandals in their past, how they voted, whether they're married or divorced, employed or not, with kids or without kids. So the better-funded team of lawyers here with the staff to somehow do all this research clearly has an advantage here, they already KNOW which people they want to accept or exclude. Again, this seems to be exaggerated here to ridiculous proportions, but that's not to say this COULDN'T happen, but at the same time, I'd imagine that it doesn't IRL.
In the middle of all of this, with the prosecution selecting jurors via the combination of one lawyer's gut reactions and his assistant's ability to profile people on the spot, and the defense employing a team of detectives to use weeks of research to build profiles of the jurors and hidden cameras in the courtroom to track their behavior, we have one potential juror who seems to be trying very hard to get OUT of jury duty. Nick Easter talks to his friends and co-workers about finding a loophole (they have bad ideas, though, like "commit a felony") and even goes out in public to a candle store to find one with St. Catherine on it, the patron saint of jurists, to try to increase his odds of not being chosen. He even tells the judge it would be a "hardship" for him to serve on the jury because the new Madden NFL game is coming out in a week, and there's a esports league he wants to compete in order to try to win $100,000. The judge does not like this and puts him directly on the jury to teach him a lesson in civics, however - PSYCH! - this is what Nick wanted all along, or something.
My first thought was that Nick was setting up some kind of "12 Angry Men" scenario, if he could get himself on the jury he could buckle down and sway 11 other jurors to get the verdict he alone wanted - but why? Maybe in New Orleans jury duty pays a little better than the job he has at the video game trade-in store? Well, this apparently wasn't the case because he did get on the jury intentionally to influence the other jurors, however it's more like a scheme he's running with his girlfriend, who contacts the attorneys on both sides and convinces them she can exert control over the jury and bring about the verdict that the highest bidder wants.
Really, this should be cause for a mistrial, even if one lawyer takes her offer, then the other one would be free to alert the judge that SOMEONE contacted them about jury tampering for a price, and suddenly there's a chance to start over, with a fresh jury. This happened to me once when I was on jury duty, on the third day somebody on the stand got very angry and said the name of a famous insurance provider out loud (it rhymes with "Eight Harm") and both parties has agreed to NOT mention that company or its findings out loud in court, so it wasn't exactly a mistrial, but they decided to clear the current jury and replace it with another one. I got paid and I got to go home very early and get on with my life! There's an incident here where an anti-gun advocate gets close to being on the jury, but after not getting chosen, he rips off his outer shirt to reveal an anti-gun t-shirt that he stars smearing with fake blood. The bailiff and guards drag him out of the courtroom, but that ALONE should have been grounds for a mistrial. But then the movie would end too early and we'd never get to find out what Nick Easter (not his real name) was up to.
Nick does disrupt the normal methods of a sequestered jury, he does win over several of his fellow jurors with his personality, he even manages to get the judge to take the jury out to lunch with him at Café Dumond - that's got to be another violation right there, I'm sure. Both attorneys didn't seem happy about the judge eating beignets with the jury, but hey, they could all be impartial together for the duration of one lunch, right? As long as they didn't discuss the case...
Nick's actions also lead to a couple of jurors getting dismissed, but this was done to show the lawyers he was blackmailing that he could control the jury, and knock out the ones sympathetic to their side if they didn't pony up the $10 million price.
We do eventually find out Nick's real name, and his hometown, and his reasons for wanting to influence the jury in this case. Does it make sense? Perhaps. Is it legal? Absolutely not. Believable? Well, that's the question of the day, isn't it? Now I'm all set up, I'm going to go watch Big Movie 5,000 - while we all keep waiting for the gun manufacturers to take some damn responsibility for mass shootings.
Directed by Gary Fleder (director of "Don't Say a Word" and "Impostor")
Also starring John Cusack (last seen in "Arsenal"), Gene Hackman (last seen in "I Am Burt Reynolds"), Dustin Hoffman (last seen in "The Holdovers"), Rachel Weisz (last seen in "Disobedience"), Bruce Davison (last seen in "Grace of My Heart"), Bruce McGill (last seen in "Belushi"), Jeremy Piven (last seen in "RocknRolla"), Nick Searcy (last seen in "The Last Song"), Stanley Anderson (last seen in "Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde"), Cliff Curtis (last seen in "Meg 2: The Trench"), Nestor Serrano (last seen in "City by the Sea"), Leland Orser (last seen in "Amsterdam"), Jennifer Beals (last seen in "The Anniversary Party"), Gerry Bamman (last seen in "Great Expectations"), Joanna Going (last seen in "Nostalgia"), Bill Nunn (last seen in "Bulletproof"), Juanita Jennings (last seen in "A Man Called Otto"), Marguerite Moreau (last seen in "Paddleton"), Nora Dunn (last seen in "LOL"), Guy Torry (last seen in "Introducing Dorothy Dandridge"), Rusty Schwimmer (last seen in "North Country"), Margo Moorer (last seen in "Brothers"), David Dwyer (last seen in "Dear John"), Michael Arata (last seen in "Love, Wedding, Marriage"), Douglas M. Griffin (ditto), Rhoda Griffis (last seen in "Blockers"), Fahnlohnee R. Harris (last seen in "Ray"), Corri English (last seen in "Race to Witch Mountain"), Jason Davis (last seen in "Irresistible"), Xuan Van Nguyen, Deneen Tyler (last seen in "Jeff, Who Lives at Home"), Zach Hanner (last seen in "Tammy"), Andrea Powell (last seen in "A Good Old Fashioned Orgy"), Ted Manson (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), David Jensen (last seen in "Welcome to the Rileys"), Lori Heuring (last seen in "Mulholland Drive"), Adella Gautier (last seen in "Now You See Me"), Afemo Omilami (last seen in "Poms"), Celia Weston (ditto), Barret O'Brien, Ned Bellamy (last seen in "Father Stu"), Orlando Jones (last seen in "Say It Isn't So"), Gary Grubbs (last seen in "Project Almanac"), Lark Marie Fall, Marco St. John (last seen in "Fantastic Four" (2015)), Henry Darrow (last seen in "Maverick"), Don Henderson Baker (last seen in "Lizzie"), Danny Kamin (last seen in "The Newton Boys"), Lance E. Nichols (last seen in "The Burial"), Deacon Dawson (last seen in "Identity Thief"), Elliott Street (last seen in "Last Vegas"), Mike Pniewski (last seen in "Safe Haven"), Joe Chrest (last seen in "The Lovebirds"), David Ramsey, Marcus Hester (last seen in "American Made"), Lara Grice (last seen in "We Have a Ghost"), Loren Kinsella, Mark Jeffrey Miller (last seen in "The Devil All the Time"), Wayne Roberts, Harvey Reaves, Wayne Ferrara (last seen in "Waiting..."), Peter Jurasik (last seen in "42"), Shannon Eubanks (last seen in "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil"), Irene Ziegler (last seen in "Safe Haven"), Ed Nelson (last seen in "Midway"), Bernard Hocke (last seen in "The Dirt"), Mark Krasnoff, Christopher Mankiewicz (last seen in "Eraser"), Cedric Pendleton, Sally Ann Roberts, Stuart Greer (last seen in "The Mechanic"), Kathey Seiden, Jack Massey, with cameos from Dylan McDermott (last seen in "Destiny Turns on the Radio"), Luis Guzman (last seen in "Welcome to Collinwood")
RATING: 5 out of 10 broken car windows
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