Runaway Jury (2003) As part of our light summer viewing we'd taken to re-visiting high profile all star blockbuster thrillers that used to fill up the multiplexes on a regular basis......
Our jaw dropped when we came back to this one......because we'd completely forgotten it dealt with a multi-million dollar civil suit against a gun manufacturer.
The suit is filed by the grieving widow of a man slaughtered in his office, along with many of his co-workers, by a disgruntled psycho, heavily armed with an automatic weapon made by the gun company named in the suit.
Since the verdict of this trial hinges on the composition of its jury, a true Clash-Of-The-Titans ensues between the major players involved.
The wily, veteran prosecutor Wendell Rohr (Dustin Hoffman) knows his way around skilled jury selection, but he's up against a formidable opponent.
And it's not the gun company's defense attorney, (Bruce Davison) who's merely another puppet for the real guy who's pulling the strings, professional jury-packer Rankin Fitch. (Gene Hackman)
Fitch, a ruthless, soulless master manipulator, commands a fully equipped control room staff of hackers, investigators and when called upon, vicious thugs. Their singular task - to customize and guarantee, through guile, blackmail or whatever's deemed necessary, a pre-purchased jury who'll exonerate Fitch's client.
Into this boiling controversial trial comes a wild card, Nicholas Easter (John Cusack) a genial slacker unwillingly drafted into the jury. Or so he appears, at first. In reality, he's scheming with his partner-lover Marlee (Rachel Weisz) to single-handedly sway the jury......but to which side? And why?
Our first impression of this set-up, taken from a John Grisham bestseller, was that the premise sounded far-fetched, given our country's gun-obsessed culture. The chances of finding 12 people who'd agree to hold a gun maker responsible for murders committed with their products seemed like a blue-sky non-starter to us.....(but keeping in mind this film and book arrived long before evil maniacs began using assault weapons to shred the small children of Sandy Hook and Uvalde)
The script attempts to add more culpability to the gun makers by throwing in their shady dealings with a customer who's buying up their stock to secretly wholesale them to third parties......including the office massacre shooter. Which we suppose explains the company's going...uh...ballistic by bringing in the odious Rankin Fitch to secure them a favorable jury.
Given that "Runaway Jury" exists as a pure butter-popcorn multiplex thriller, it springs a few surprises and reversals of fortune before it arrives at its expected, crowd-pleasing conclusion.....(as we knew it would....)
What did raise our eyebrows way up high......the prescient way this movie foreshadows current events.....and its final shot that now takes on an especially powerful, urgent immediacy that the filmmakers couldn't have imagined in 2003.....
For anyone who missed this one the first time around, it's a 4 star must (****). Rapidly paced with a Class A cast from top to bottom, we found only one major flaw.......the film provides just one scene for those powerhouses Hoffman and Hackman, who studied as young actors together. And what fireworks they deliver in that corker of showdown.
......and made us not sorry we took the time to watch it again.
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