Law'd Awful Movies #3: Runaway Jury (Patreon)

For the third installment of Law'd Awful Movies, we've returned to the king of terrible legal movies:  John Grisham.  Some people have tried to tell us that John Grisham has a law degree, or that he's really writing sophisticated multi-level satire about how the layman views the law, or... look, these people have clearly never seen Runaway Jury.

We would be remiss if we didn't mention that Runaway Jury (2003) features an amazing cast:  Grisham fave Gene Hackman returns as Atticus Finch (or something), the jury consultant who surveills an entire town but somehow can't stop relatable everyman Nick Easter (played by John Cusack doing his best Tom Cruise impersonation) infiltrating the jury in order to sell the verdict to the highest bidder (or something), along with super hot girlfriend Marley Last Name Unknown (Rachel Weisz), who totally kneecaps that one dude.  Um, what else?   Dustin Hoffman is in this movie!  He plays,  you know, the guy Dustin Hoffman always plays.  So are (briefly) Dylan McDermott, Jeremy Piven, Jennifer Beals, Nora Dunn... you know, even the bit players are really good actors.

Sadly, that's where the good news ends.  The plot of this movie makes The Firm look competent.  Cusack and Weisz are out to sell the jury to the highest bidder... so of course, the last 30 minutes of the movie tries to convince you that they're really the heroes, which works amazingly well if you have that Memento disease, but less well otherwise.  The macguffin of the movie is the case itself, which is supposed to be an anti-gun something something mumble something, but really turns out to be a conservative's nightmare of what he thinks a liberal wet dream looks like.  And Gene Hackman delivers a bathroom monologue so hammy it would have produced a laugh had he done it as Lex Luthor.

Runaway Jury is a terrible movie that makes no sense as a movie and even less as a look into the law.  Join us as we rip it a new one.  

Joining us to gleefully pile on this festering pile of garbge are two of our favorite people, Tom and Cecil,  from one of our favorite podcasts, Cognitive Dissonance.

Enjoy!

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