Juror #2 review: Clint Eastwood’s best movie in years. It’s a shame you probably can’t see it

At 94 years old, Clint Eastwood has reached the age where every new movie he makes could be his last. He’s also lived long enough to direct several that felt like his last at the time — an intermittent supply of old-man dramas in which the star cast himself as an aging cowboy, trainer, or veteran saddling up for one final ride. There’s nothing so explicitly valedictory about Juror #2, Eastwood’s latest movie and, yes, maybe his last. For one thing, he’s not in the film, which prevents it from looking like another swan song for the man who was The Man With No Name. What he’s made instead is a tense, involving legal thriller that proves that this nonagenarian legend still has plenty of storytelling vigor in him 70 years into his career.

In fact, Juror #2 is Eastwood’s best movie in ages. The plot, devised by first-time screenwriter Jonathan Abrams, is improbable enough to have been pulled from the pages of a John Grisham bestseller. But Eastwood tackles it with the directness and moral clarity of one-time contemporary Sidney Lumet, who made some of the greatest courtroom dramas in Hollywood history. You could even call Juror #2 a kind of 21st-century riff on Lumet’s most beloved movie, 12 Angry Men, that story of a single juror who calmly, patiently persuades eleven others that they might have some doubt and that it could be reasonable.

The Henry Fonda figure here is Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult), a polite magazine writer and recovering alcoholic who would much rather be at home tending to his pregnant wife (Zoey Deutch) than deliberating on the evidence of a murder trial. Justin becomes the voice of reason on the jury, arguing for a little discussion before they condemn a possibly innocent man to life in prison. But there’s a wrinkle in our hero’s nobility, a twist on that formula. Early into the trial, it dawns on him: The night the defendant (Gabriel Basso) followed his girlfriend out of a bar and allegedly killed her, dumping her body in a roadside creek, Justin visited that same bar, drove down that same stretch of road, and hit what he convinced himself was a deer …

It’s an ingeniously far-fetched premise, built on a moral dilemma with real stakes. Justin, who Hoult plays like a seasick man steeling his nerves upon every sway of the boat, has a tricky needle to thread. To assuage his conscience, he has to nudge his fellow jurors towards uncertainty … without implicating himself or triggering a mistrial that might uncover enough to land him behind bars, far from his wife and their child on the way. One of the clever ironies of the material is that Justin is at once ideally positioned to advocate for justice (he has, after all, information that all but demands reasonable doubt) and a direct threat to the impartiality of the process, given that the verdict could have an effect on his own future. Is there a greater conflict of interest than ruling on a crime you may have committed?

Juror #2 is old-fashioned, but never creaky. Around Hoult’s sweaty, largely reactive performance (a crucible of private culpability expressed mostly through his eyes), Eastwood builds a sturdy case for the timeless pleasures of the genre: the overruled objections; the cross-examinations; the respectful, but sometimes heated sparring of opposing counsel, with the two sides of the trial occupied by a typically understated Chris Messina (as the honest public defender) and Toni Collette (rocking a prototypical Southern loyah accent as the prosecutor whose run for the DA job hinges on landing a conviction).

Meanwhile, the jury is filled out with flavorful archetypes and caricatures, introduced during a snappy montage of the selection process: the chipper foreperson (Leslie Bibb) with a history of sitting on hung juries; the community organizer (Cedric Yarbrough) so convinced that the defendant is bad news that he won’t entertain the possibility of innocence; the ex-cop (J.K. Simmons) who reveals his pertinent qualifications by dramatically tossing his badge onto the table, and who ends up conducting his own forbidden investigation. Juror #2 sketches in these characters with convenient motivational backstory and miniature monologues that shine a light on their biases. It’s cornball, but really no more so than, well, 12 Angry Men.

Forever the unfussy, unpretentious stylist, Eastwood is a good fit for the who, what, where nature of criminal proceedings. Like a good attorney, he lines up the information and paints us a picture — at one point, by cutting together the opposing closing arguments into a single summary of the case, with Hoult’s mounting distress as the emotional throughline. Not that Juror #2 ever offers a full view of the truth. The flashbacks to that fateful night don’t so much clear everything up as raise doubts and questions, as do two separate, subtly subjective remembrances of a shouting match outside a roadhouse. The audience, like the jury, is led to a possible conclusion, but Eastwood doesn’t confirm it.

The movie is partially about confirmation bias — about how evidence is collected (and ignored) to support a theory, and about how preconceived notions sometimes shape our understanding of that evidence. Eastwood, who’s spent much of his career casting a suspicious eye on institutions, depicts the justice system as a virtuous idea complicated by the motives of its practitioners. Almost no one comes out unscathed. Not Justin, trying to do some version of the right thing without taking any responsibility. And not Collette’s hard-nosed prosecutor, who ends up wrestling with the possibility that she’s steamrolling an innocent man partially in service of her political ambitions. The film’s conclusions are withering, but not didactic, because Eastwood is a storyteller first, and rarely (if ever) a polemicist.

With Juror #2, he’s made the kind of adult-oriented, actor-driven entertainment that’s difficult to take for granted in our all-ages blockbuster age. Unless you’re David Zaslav, the Warner Bros. executive who’s rewarded the director’s decades of loyalty to the studio by barely releasing what might turn out to be his final film. If this really is Clint’s farewell, it’s an oddly fitting one. While Eastwood has made his share of elegiac tributes to his own star power, he’s spent most of the last half-century not dwelling too much on what each new project means to his legacy. Juror #2 feels like a movie he could have made at any point over that time, which is ultimately why it could prove to be such an appropriate punctuation on his career — even if it’s good enough to leave you hoping that he hasn’t hung up his spurs just yet.

Juror #2 is now playing in woefully select theaters for a regrettably brief time. See it while you can. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.