'Jury' presents a strong case with great performances

By Ty Burr, Globe Staff, 10/17/2003

The most deliciously absurd notion in "Runaway Jury," the fine new popcorn thriller based on the John Grisham novel, is this: that while you and I grudgingly perform our civic duty by responding to jury summonses and while away entire workdays on uncomfortable wooden benches, a secret army of surveillance experts is watching our every move.

They have the courtroom bugged and the lead prosecutor's briefcase outfitted with a spycam. They're aware of Juror No. 4's drinking problem and Juror No. 8's abortion. And they have a $12 million kitty from America's gun manufacturers to ensure that the verdict goes their way. "Gentlemen," says their leader, legal consultant Rankin Fitch (Gene Hackman), to a room full of sneering CEOs, "trials are too important to be left to juries. Heh heh heh."

He really does say "Heh heh heh," and if his moustache were long enough, he'd twirl it. But this is Gene Hackman, so it's all part of the fun. In fact, "Runaway Jury" may nominally star the ever-likable John Cusack as Nick Easter, a juror playing his own game of sell-the-verdict, but time and again you're drawn to Fitch's cheery, magnetic soullessness. Hackman is 73, and he has never been more on top of his game.

Adding to the thespian enjoyment is Hackman's onetime roommate, Dustin Hoffman, wearing big hair and a folksy southern accent as New Orleans defense attorney Wendell Rohr. He represents the widow of a stockbroker (Dylan McDermott) gunned down in the opening scenes by a demented co-worker; he's helping her sue the monolithic Vicksburg Firearms because he wants "to make gun violence the gun industry's problem."

That's about as political as "Runaway Jury" gets. There's been some kerfuffle among Grisham fans because the villainous tobacco corporations of the 1996 novel have been changed to gun companies, but that change-up may be the result more of recent court decisions and the thunder-stealing 1999 film "The Insider" than of anti-NRA machinations on the part of Hollywood. Anyway, the trial itself is a McGuffin -- it's the power struggle between Fitch, Easter, and Rohr that is the film's true locus of drama.

After some brief pussyfooting, "Jury" establishes that Nick is in cahoots with his steel-nerved girlfriend, Marlee (Rachel Weisz), and has managed to get himself on the jury for the express purpose of swaying the vote. Why? Greed seems the most likely reason, since the duo quickly set about shaking down both sides for $10 million, winner take all. Rohr, upholder of all things democratic and true, dithers and frets. Fitch just aims his sizable array of cannons and fires.

There are chases and burning buildings and even a kung-fu fight -- blurts of hugger-mugger to keep the audience from getting restive -- and the story line has been updated to include an Apple iPod as a crucial bit of evidence. "Runaway Jury" derives most of its pleasure, though, from psychological gamesmanship. The battle is fought on two fronts: in the jury box, where Nick has to keep two steps ahead of Fitch while guilelessly befriending the other jurors, and out on the streets, where shadowy goons stalk Marlee.

One watches the jury-room scenes with a frustration bordering on panic, though. Director Gary Fleder has cast the 11 other chairs with foolproof character-actors and then lets them slip away with mere seconds of individual screen time. Bill Nunn, Nora Dunn, Luis Guzman, Cliff Curtis -- you know their faces, even if you don't know their names -- all go wasted, and Jennifer Beals barely registers at all. Didn't "Flashdance" mean anything to these people?

"Runaway Jury" makes up for it in, of all places, a courthouse men's room. That's where Rohr finally confronts Fitch and where Hoffman and Hackman get screen time together for the first time in a friendship that goes back four decades. The scene doesn't have anything to do with advancing the plot. It's just a lovely, spiky little pas de deux between pros -- the sort of acting-class exercise two young actors might once have daydreamed about.

In "Jury," Cusack is the young actor, and he strives mightily to remain breezy and tart. You stay with him even as it dawns on you that Nick and Marlee would have to have reams of advance information and incredible luck to even think about pulling off their game. But we read beach novels to be sucked into believing the impossible, and "Jury" is the closest cinematic approximation to a beach novel that money and skill can buy. All that's missing is the embossed cover and the Mojito.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.