Runaway Jury - Good v. Evil v. A Third Party?

my rating: Nathan's rating:

With both Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman in a movie together, how could you go wrong? Have they ever done a movie together that was a dud?

OK, that's a trick question, because the closest they've come to doing a movie together was Hackman's near-casting as Mr. Robinson in The Graduate. But still, the number of terrible movies that either of them has done separately is pretty small. And Runaway Jury is not on the list.

Gene Hackman is a slick jury selection specialist, an expert who helps high-priced lawyers make sure they get jurors who will be sympathetic to their side. He's working for the gun manufacturer in a high-stakes civil trial brought by the widow of a shooting victim. Dustin Hoffman is the widow's attorney, a folksy but sharp advocate of gun control, intent on finally beating the gun industry in court. It'd be a standard courtoom drama if not for the two wildcards: planted juror John Cusack, and Rachel Weisz, his partner in a scam to "sell" that jury to one side or the other.

It's an interesting angle on the well-tread genre of courtroom dramas, looking at an angle of the legal system that most people aren't very familiar with. Which of course gives them a degree of creative liberty, since your typical movie-goer won't know what's realistic or not. Having been through jury selection and jury duty myself (albeit on a much lower-stakes case), I can confirm that jury selection does take place, but I can't see it getting quite this... overwrought, with levels of espionage that the CIA would envy. Not even The Bad Guys would be capable of all that.

"The Bad Guys" in this film clearly includes the gun manufacturers and their expansive legal team. Hackman is deliciously amoral and conniving throughout the whole story. Hoffman, with his one, relucatantly-hired minor-league jury selection expert comes across as The Good Guy, of course. Cusack and Weisz are harder to pin down, playing Good and Bad against each other. That's the key suspense of the case: figuring out how their elaborate jury tampering is going to play out.

The biggest credibility problem of the plot is believing that no one would blow the whistle on the scam. When both sides know that they're both being offered a chance to buy a verdict, it's hard to buy the notion that this scam will actually work. The losing party would squeal, using their knowledge of the tampering to appeal or get a retrial. But if you set aside that kind of reasoning and think like a movie-goer, it's not too difficult to just go along for the ride, wondering who will outsmart whom in the end, and how.

Nathan had no difficulty doing that; the law is not exactly his forté. He doesn't like guns, but that's just because he's afraid of them. It's not a political thing for him. So his biggest problem was the whole premise of the trial on which the plot was built. Having grown up listening to his parents and other elders belittle the whole idea of corporate liability - because it questions the basic tenet of capitalism that anything which is both legal and profitable is blameless - he couldn't accept the notion that a gun manufacturer could bear any responsibility for what's done with the weapons they produce. So explaining the difference between a criminal trial and a civil suit, and the basis of product liability law was a nice educational opportunity.

The movie actually showed only bits and pieces of the trial itself - the real drama was in the jury room and especially the aforementioned spy stuff and extortion scenes - so it's impossible to reach a real conclusion in this case. Which is something of a weakness of the film, because it does take a position before the final credits roll, and you're left either accepting it or not based on your own prejudices... not the evidence you never get to hear. In fact, I have some misgivings about the question of gun manufacturer's legal responsibility. They cannot be held liable for every heinous act committed with the products they create, unless they were complicit or blatantly negligent regarding them. Their moral responsibility is another question, however. A courtroom drama that argues the moral question rather than legal one is a bit of a dramatic cheat.