The student news site of Marquette University

Marquette Wire

The student news site of Marquette University

Marquette Wire

The student news site of Marquette University

Marquette Wire

‘Jury’ derailed by plot

An indication of where the story is going starts as soon as a man with a gun rampages through his former place of employment. This leads to a lawsuit against the gun manufacturer by the widow of one of the people slain in the shooting.

And then the storytelling kicks in. Wendell Rohr (Dustin Hoffman) represents the widow in the case and carries all the mannerisms of an honest Southern lawyer out for making things right. But the gun side goes a little more high-tech than the good ol’ boy lawyers.

They hire Rankin Fitch (Gene Hackman), a jury consultant who uses cameras and operatives to thoroughly investigate and dissect every detail of potential juror’s lives.

But the battle between the two sides of the law gets a little more complicated when Nicholas Easter (John Cusack) makes it onto the jury. While Easter seems like a likable electronics store employee, he has some ulterior motives.

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Easter and his girlfriend Marlee (Rachel Weisz) both intend to sway the jury in the favor of whichever side gives the pair $10 million.

And then the story gets bogged down by making the sides in this case extremely black-and-white. The gun manufacturer’s president is just seen as heartless and it’s hard to make Fitch and his team look any slimier. And when Fitch and his team dig deeper into the lives of the jurors, the believability of “Runaway Jury” gets lost.

A trial where a man jumps out of the jury box smeared in blood during jury selection, another juror gets his apartment burned down and a third attempts suicide, doesn’t seem that likely to evade a mistrial, but somehow it happens.

There are some great performances in the film. Hackman’s constantly sneering and heartless performance is another in a string of memorable efforts as of late. Hoffman, New Orleans accent and all, still is fun to watch as the morally conflicted lawyer. And Cusack gets a role that plays up his natural charisma by having him serve as the one person who can get the rest of the jury to follow him.

But director Gary Fleder keeps all these actors away from each other for too much of the movie. Each of those three actors only gets one scene with each other. While these scenes are great, the wasted opportunities are disappointing.

But there are just so many characters in the film that unnecessarily jumble the action. Jeremy Piven’s prosecution jury consultant doesn’t talk for the second half of the movie and the wonderful Luis Guzman is basically window-dressing as a juror.

There’s also a lot of threaded connections to other films in “Runaway Jury” that never really pay off. Hackman and Hoffman are long-time friends and Cusack and Piven appear in their sixth film together, though there isn’t one scene between the two. The film also finds direct inspiration from “12 Angry Men,” though the complicated twists and technology of “Runaway Jury” fail to match the pure human drama of the earlier film.

There feels like there’s a great movie somewhere in “Runaway Jury,” but so many roadblocks, complications and over-the-top images drag the film down.

Grade: C,”Matthew T. Olson”