‘Runaway Jury’ is a hugely engrossing legal potboiler, adapted from a John Grisham novel, and paints a believable, if hokum, proposition that some trials can be bought, with nefarious, amoral lawyers spying on the jurors inside and outside the courtroom in order to control and influence the outcome of a case. Gene Hackman delivers one of his last screen performances as the aptly named Rankin Fitch, jury consultant and principal representative for a leading gun manufacturer that is being sued following a mass shooting.

Inevitably, this is a David and Goliath struggle with Fitch having an unlimited arsenal of money and co-workers on the case, while Dustin Hoffman’s prosecution lawyer has only a psychology graduate, who works for a small fee, to assist him. The outcome may not be a surprise, but the journey there is unpredictable, and we have to wait until the end to find out how all the pieces of the jigsaw come together. Somehow, reluctant juror Nick Easter (John Cusack) is not so reluctant after all, feigning indifference and even contempt for having to serve on a jury when there are side hustles to play for, yet he has managed to calculate every conceivable dynamic to ensure that he gets selected.

There is a popcorn entertainment flavour to seeing the Mephistophelian Fitch being upstaged by a renegade juror who is able to create more harm than Fitch himself when standing in front of a bank of surveillance cameras from which he barks orders and makes snap judgements as to who needs to be on or off ‘his’ jury. Fitch is a cartoon figure, essentially, who believes that justice is too important to be left in the hands of a jury, but Hackman cannot fail to invest in him which, in lesser hands, would have been fully one-dimensional.

What we see in Fitch is a character who has managed to outwit his adversaries over decades in the courtroom, but he has finally met his match, and it is worth the price of admission to witness Fitch realize that he has been upstaged and outsmarted. Easter appears to have, for all intents and purposes, dropped out of the sky, and it is his mysterious origins – all of which is explained at the end – which invest ‘Runaway Jury’ with an almost mythological undercurrent. He is the wily figure with a past, chequered history of dealing with the film’s villain, or nemesis.

Like the Pale Rider in Clint Eastwood’s western, he has to find an ingenious way of achieving his goals without necessarily signalling to the world what his methods and motives are. He cannot show his hand or else the game will be void. Easter is a chameleon figure who uses trickery and manipulation to engender a positive outcome, and the game entails the playing off of contrary forces and agendas. What is not quite so clear, however, is how Easter managed to get himself on the jury in the first place. As the plot machinations only gradually fall into place we have no reason to imagine anything other than that his jury selection is both random and inconvenient.

In this respect the film to which ‘Runaway Jury’ is most closely related is the Clint Eastwood swansong ‘Juror #2’ where a random jury call leads to the unexpected realization that the protagonist is directly implicated in the trial to which he has been selected. Except that in ‘Runaway Jury’ we are left thinking that nothing at all has been left to chance. It is disposable entertainment, but this film also gives us a masterclass in acting prowess on the part particularly of Hoffman and Hackman who share one crucial scene together which is all the more seismic on account of it being underplayed.

I also reviewed this film in November 2020 – here’s the earlier review:

John Grisham adaptations were all the rage in the 90s, and ‘Runaway Jury’ was made at a time when the genre was reaching the end of its shelf-life. This has shades of all the previous ones, though it doesn’t go quite where you expect it to. Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman were apparently good friends but had never starred in a movie before this one, and instead of lots of grandstanding and posturing on the courtroom floor their only scene together is inside a locked courthouse toilet. I guess it’s fair to say that they both win the pissing contest.

Hackman is the amoral jury surveillance consultant who has been hired by a gun company to make sure he wins the case that goes to court after a massacre two years previously in which the perpetrator had too easy access to the gun which took the life of the husband of the widow who employs Hoffman’s liberal prosecutor. Hackman has no scruples, no conscience, no moral centre – for him it is always a case of winning at all costs. He has access to all the records of everyone on the jury, and anyone associated with them, and will stop at nothing – blackmail, threats, even robbing and then burning down the home of one of the jury members, if it will help him win the case.

Every line sees him cackling with disdain and contempt for everyone in the jury pool who might be a loose cannon or vote against the gun lobby: ‘I hate Baptists as much as I hate Democrats’. But one of the members of the jury, played with his usual insouciant charm by John Cusack, appears to have his own reasons and technique when it comes to manipulating a jury, and for much of the film we are forced to guess as to how he managed to infiltrate the jury in the first place – especially when we see him trying everything he can to get off jury duty.

What this comes down to is a very mainstream, chic, handsomely produced courtroom drama that takes a clear side on the question of gun control and the malfeasance of those who run and represent their lobby. We think that Cusack and his partner Rachel Weisz are playing off the prosecution and defence for financial gain, charging both sides £10m for the luxury of delivering the verdict their way. But nothing is as it seems and for all its high tech charm and polished veneer, ‘Runaway Jury’ has a very clear moral centre. This is a good, twisty, intelligent surveillance-based courtroom drama.