And as usual with an Eastwood movie, I have questions about its understanding of law enforcement and justice. Eastwood is a law and order guy. He believes in justice and truth and morality, but his films so frequently find that justice and truth outside of the legal system as it exists. This was an important question for me with his movie Richard Jewell, in which the entire film believes in law enforcement, has faith in the system, and wants to follow proper procedures, but then the very villains of the film happen also to be the FBI, the entity with proper legal jurisdiction and the designated arm of the justice system in which the film so fervently believes. It's so strange to me.
Juror #2 tries this same dance. The justice system completely fails to solve this case. The cops in the story (they don't actually appear in the film) are lazy; they haven't actually done any detective work to solve the crime, and in fact they let the real killer go free. Instead it falls to other people to go rogue, to break the rules and solve the case through unsanctioned procedures and detective work that the police weren't willing to do themselves.
All of this is fine, really. It's Eastwood's complicated relationship with law enforcement and the justice system, and he stages that in film after film (as long ago as Dirty Harry, honestly). But that doesn't actually make Juror #2 interesting. In fact, for me this movie was no more interesting than an episode of Matlock, and it felt as artificial. Worse yet, the people in this film don't behave like people in the twenty-first century; they behave like the kinds of abstractions we might expect in a film from classic Hollywood, something starring Jimmy Stewart that we might have seen in the mid-1950s.
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