Runaway Jury
Runaway Jury is not a movie about gun control. Despite what many reactionary pundits might say, this 2003 legal thriller based on a book by John Grisham is about the nature of influence in justice. It is about how people shape their opinions and choices and about what can influence a jury in the imperfect, subjective courtroom.
Directed by Gary Fleder, Runaway Jury uses an ensemble cast in bringing Grisham’s novel to life. There were a few changes to the story, with the main one being a shift of the case from Grisham’s idea of a tobacco company to the more updated version of a firearms manufacturer. Even so, the basic components of the story stay and the basic premise, one couched in the notion of jury selection and tampering, remains as well.
The film centers on a woman (Joanna Going) whose husband is killed in a workplace shooting. She decides, given that the gunman killed himself in the crime, to take on the gun manufacturing company on the grounds of gross negligence. This leads to a firestorm of publicity, as one might imagine, and she gets the services of pro bono attorney Wendell Rohr (Dustin Hoffman) to help her take on the massive gun manufacturer.
Of course, the gun manufacturer outweighs Rohr and his client in almost every fashion, hiring “jury consultant” Rankin Fitch (Gene Hackman) to set up an ideal jury. The process to do this is meticulous and there is an elaborate and far-fetched operation put into place to get the jury just how the gun group wants it. In the end, however, one particular juror (John Cusack) turns out to have motives of his own that throw the outcome of the trial in the air.
The whole gun control issue really is just the backdrop to this tale of the lengths people and organizations will go to get the wheels of justice to turn their way. There’s a lot of posturing and moving around in this motion picture and some of it works rather well. Most of it, however, feels implausible and borderline ridiculous.
Cusack’s character, together with the help of his accomplice (Rachel Weisz), manages to manipulate the process with the greatest of ease. He passes information to his accomplice on the outside easily, despite being in one of the most important juries in the country, and is able to freely exchange information with her without much trouble from the law. Despite all the trouble Fitch and his team go through, they aren’t very effective at stomping out this problem either.
Fleder’s approach the material here is bland tech thriller stuff, with the use of slo-mo and all sorts of other old tricks packed in to help boost some of the “action.” Unfortunately the director adds nothing of interest to Runaway Jury, so it’s up to the actors and the team-written script to get things done.
The performances are good, although none really stand out as being all that remarkable. Hackman is the best of the bunch, putting a decent dose of slime into Fitch and creating a character whose only motivation appears to be profit. It’s a stereotype, sure, but all the characters (include the scrubby guy who yells “bullshit” at the end of the trial) in this movie are stereotypes.
In the end, Runaway Jury is just barely recommendable. The story probably owes more to Grisham’s book than it does to anything going in Fleder’s movie, however, and one will probably get the same idea without all the formulaic nonsense by just reading the novel. Even so, Runaway Jury is probably worth a look if it happens to pop up on television when there’s nothing else on.
Trailer:
