From director Clint Eastwood comes a courthouse film of detrimental misdirection. Juror #2 is one of the most authentic and stressful films of thought. It presents a layer of underlying issues that is being tossed around repeatedly. Eastwood knows characterizations and perspectives. Eastwood’s use of directing to get the full scope of a conflict lies out all kinds of emotions. If this is Eastwood’s last film, it is both monumental and tainted. “Tainted” by the fact that its release is so limited due to his disputes with Warner Bros. That is besides the point, but to elaborate, not everyone may get the chance to see it in the theatrical format (which is how it should be seen).

The film gears on Justin Kemp (played by Nicholas Hoult). Justin a normal man with a lot to live for, he has a happy relationship with his wife Allison Crewson (played by Zoey Deutch), and they are on their way to having their first child. Justin has jury duty and finds himself taking part in a trial of murder that carries a strong following. With serving on a jury with a retired police officer, Harold (played by JK Simmons), Marcus (played by Cedric Yarbrough), Denice (played by Leslie Bibb), and more, there is a lot of moving parts. The most stressful aspect is that Justin feels he is the one who caused the crime to happen. Despite the case of having a victim of a violent past, Justin’s memories come back to him. He is on the jury of a case he may have been the cause of. With two high-end attorneys Faith Killebrew (played by Toni Collette) and Eric Resnick (played by Christ Messina), justice is a puzzle that Justin keeps trying to spin around in circles. 

The case keeps linking back to the victim as one who did a killing, but he may have not. It may have been Justin, but no one knows this for sure, and neither does Justin. The mental stressors of Juror #2 present characterizations that keep the stressors mounted—keeping calm to find justice is not an easy task. The performance of Hoult shines of guilt while also trying to find a safe way for him to return to his life without feeling such admissions of guilt. There is no easy way for that to happen.

With Hoult and Collette in a performance by Eastwood, this is the second time they play two individuals not (always) seeing eye-to-eye. Collette played the mother of Hoult in About a Boyback in 2002. In that classic, they played a mother and son not finding common ground, twenty-two years later it is a juror and an attorney trying to find the pieces of where the deceit lies. Both of which play their roles so faithfully well. The court dynamics of facts, politics, seniority, and fairness keep tumbling over each other in the context of sacrifice. “Sacrifice” is a heavy aspect from Eastwood. With being just over nine decades old, the characterizations of truth still fight hard to find the correlations. The spellbinding notion of Juror #2 is the no excuses vibe of seriousness that flows from what started the whole case. Three-and-a-half out of four stars.