Review
RUNAWAY JURY
Starring Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, John Cusack and Rachel Weisz
Directed Gary Fleder
Opens Friday, October 17
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Gene Hackman must love this kind of role – after all he’s played it before in The Quick and the Dead, Extreme Measures and The Firm. Hackman starts out immaculately groomed, flaunting the accoutrements of wealth and power. He’s articulate and evil, terrorizing everyone with his oily brand of power. By the end of the movie, he’s running, disheveled and panicked, and no one’s listening to him anymore. His world has collapsed and the audience loves it.
Hackman delivers the goods again in Runaway Jury. He plays a jury consultant, Rankin Fitch who is hired by a legal team defending gun manufacturers in a civil case brought by a woman who was widowed in a shooting incident. Fitch’s carefully laid plans go awry when a juror and an accomplice decide to take matters into their own hands and manipulate the jury for their own motives.
The cast of Runaway Jury do their job competently. The four leads, Hackman as the consultant, John Cusack as the juror, Rachel Weisz as his partner and Dustin Hoffman as the defence attorney, are all great talents and do well with the material. The plot takes some satisfying and improbable twists and the production values are all in place. New Orleans looks terrific and the courtroom interiors are suitably imposing. It’s all as expected for this type of melodrama. And there’s the rub.
This movie is as slick and smooth and as Hackman’s character, and about as profound. There’s no subtlety to the moral message underpinning the convoluted plot. The plaintiff is the archetypal innocent victim – an attractive mother of a cute little tyke, recently widowed but bravely taking on the might of the evil corporations, in memory of her husband. The family-man victim of the shooting is glimpsed only at his son’s birthday celebration and then moments before his death, as he gamely tries to learn a song to further delight the boy. (Would his murder be any less wrong if he were single and childless, or if his widow were plain?)
The final scene, wrapping up the moral message of the film, is classic Hollywood overstatement. Despite that Runaway Jury is a good-looking, absorbing thriller. It’s got all the requisite elements, including attractive locations, competent direction and sound performances in an entertaining but ultimately empty package. |
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