Juror #2: Motion to find this drama engaging!

Juror #2 (2024) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and occasional profanity

Available via: MAX

By Derrick Bang

Twisty courtroom thrillers have been scarce lately, and this one’s a corker.

 

Jonathan A. Abrams’ sharp script — an impressive screenwriting debut — is well matched with director Clint Eastwood’s capably measured approach. The first half hour sets up expectations of a feisty battle between prosecutor Faith Killebrew (Toni Collette) and defense attorney Eric Resnick (Chris Messina), possibly moving into 12 Angry Men territory, involving a lone hold-out during jury deliberations.

 

Justin (Nicholas Hoult, second from left in the front row) soon realizes that he likely knows
more than the rest of his fellow jurors. They include Harold (J.K. Simmons, two seats to
Justin's left.)

But no. Abrams’ plot is more twisty ... and while he does include a nod to that famous 1954 Reginald Rose stage play-turned-film, things move in unexpected directions.

The setting is Savannah, Georgia. Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult), a recovering alcoholic four years sober, writes for a regional lifestyle magazine. He’s married to Allison (Zoey Deutch), nine months into a high-risk pregnancy, after previous efforts failed. She’s understandably anxious and clinging, and the last thing she wants is for Justin to get tagged after showing up for a jury summons.

 

Their initial dynamic feels brittle, which Hoult and Deutch handle persuasively. She’s a fragile mess, and he’s patient and solicitous to an exaggerated degree. It becomes clear that, just as Allison doesn’t want to do anything to screw up her pregnancy, Justin doesn’t want to betray the second chance that she gave him, four years earlier.

 

Justin does indeed get selected, after an amusing exchange with Judge Thelma Hollub (Amy Aquino, always solid). It’s a murder trial, with James Michael Sythe (Gabriel Basso) accused of killing his girlfriend, Kendall Carter (Francesca Eastwood), after a nasty spat at The Hideaway, their favorite bar. 

 

As recounted in flashback — by several witnesses — a few details change, Rashomon-style. Even so, the core events seem solid: Sythe and Carter argued, and he broke a bottle; they continued to yell at each other outside, in the pouring rain; she left in a huff, walking down the darkened road; after a brief pause, he got into his car and followed her.

 

A hiker found Carter’s body the next morning, in a creek channel beneath a bridge along the same road.

 

Killebrew builds a solid case, based primarily on Sythe’s sketchy history and longtime aggressive behavior. But as Resnick subsequently points out, nobody saw his client kill Carter; the evidence is entirely circumstantial. As a sidebar, Killebrew has tied this case to her election campaign for district attorney; she can’t lose. This adds an unsavory note to Collette’s performance, as we wonder whether Killebrew’s judgment is compromised.

Beautiful Boy: Descent into drug hell

Beautiful Boy (2018) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity and graphic drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 10.26.18

This film is highlighted by quiet, extraordinarily powerful little moments.

Director Felix Van Groeningen often is wise enough to simply hold his camera on stars Timothée Chalamet and Steve Carell, and they never disappoint. Chalamet, in particular, is a fascinating study, his character’s intelligent glow gradually dimming as this morose story proceeds.

Having already watched his son Nic (Timothée Chalamet, left) relapse repeatedly,
despite numerous stints in detox and rehab, David Sheff (Steve Carell) wonders
if things will be any different this time.

Unfortunately, the film as a whole disappoints.

Stories that trace the downward spiral of drug addiction are of a type, and it’s hard to bring any freshness to a narrative with beats that are both inevitable and familiar: the initial descent and personality shift; the attempt at recovery and subsequent relapse; the attempt at recovery and subsequent relapse. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Van Groeningen and co-scripter Luke Davies deserve credit for trying to adjust the recipe, and it’s somewhat novel to view so much of this saga from the viewpoint of those who represent collateral damage: which is to say, the helpless family members. On the other hand, the constant flashbacks become irritating, even confusing. While it makes sense for David Sheff (Carell) to remember the cheerful, jovial kid his son Nic once was, at times it’s difficult to know whether a given scene — with Nicolas (Chalamet) as a young adult — is in the “present,” or the not-quite-present.

The story definitely gets additional dramatic heft from its real-world origins. Sheff is a widely celebrated journalist and author whose résumé includes work for Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Fortune and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. Van Groeningen and Davies’ script is adapted from Sheff’s best-selling 2008 memoir of the same title: a painfully raw account of dealing with Nic’s addiction to methamphetamine.

The script also draws from Nic’s version of events, in his book Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines.

Difficult as it is, to watch this film at times, Van Groeningen and Davies chose not to include some of the books’ even bleaker events. Which probably is just as well.

Although Chalamet has the “showier” role, Carell’s David is the story’s focus. His is the more challenging acting job, since David most frequently reacts in response to Nic’s behavior. Carell’s face is a constant study in pain: haunted gaze and slumped posture, burdened by weary desperation. Rarely has the phrase “carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders” seemed more apt.

It’s natural to expect that if this saga includes a life-changing epiphany, it’ll belong to Nic; after all, the options are sharply etched. Either he kicks the habit, or he dies. But the crucial moment of dawning realization — a genuinely heartbreaking scene — actually belongs to David: when he finally, reluctantly, despondently realizes that he can’t fix this.

We’re reminded of the “three Cs” during an Al-Anon meeting that takes place toward the end of the film: You didn’t cause it; you can’t control it; you can’t cure it. Impossibly difficult to accept, for a parent accustomed to being a child’s full-time protector.

The Lazarus Effect: Dead on arrival

The Lazarus Effect (2015) • View trailer 
One star. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, horror violence and mild sensuality
By Derrick Bang

This is what passes for scary these days?

This laughable, ludicrous swill?

Modern audiences are getting very short-changed.

With his suddenly homicidal fiancée prowling the darkened corridors outside their lab,
Frank (Mark Duplass) cautions Eva (Sarah Bolger) to stay quiet, while he concocts a
silly plan to save the day.

This flaccid rubbish is bad in so many ways, one scarcely knows where to begin. Luke Dawson and Jeremy Slater’s irrationally asinine script? David Gelb’s artless, hammer-handed directing? The cast of blithering idiots who couldn’t inject credibility into their dialogue if their lives depended on it?

In fairness, bad line readings aren’t entirely the fault of the cast; nobody could have made this clumsy nonsense sound persuasive. That said, the performances also don’t deserve placement on anybody’s résumé.

At its core, this is just another sloppy re-tread of the hoary Frankenstein saga, with bioengineered chemicals taking the place of good ol’ lightning. This, too, is part of the problem; Dawson and Slater haven’t an original thought between them, and seem content to blatantly rip off vastly superior predecessors.

And they can’t even do that well.

Frank (Mark Duplass) and his fiancée Zoe (Olivia Wilde), running a research lab at a fictitious, Berkeley-based university, are being assisted by graduate students Niko (Donald Glover) and Clay (Evan Peters). The team recently has hired an undergraduate videographer, Eva (Sarah Bolger), to record their progress.

(One cliché of bad writing, by the way, is the affectation of granting people no more than first names: Nothing calls faster attention to wafer-thin, one-dimensional characters.)

Although Eva’s presence gives Gelb an excuse to dabble in “found footage”-style video inserts, this affectation — mercifully — quickly is replaced by Michael Fimognari’s conventional cinematography. Which, to be fair, is a point in Gelb’s favor.

Anyway...

Frank and Zoe apparently obtained their original grant to develop a chemical “boost” that would help revive patients who code on an operating table: something akin to adrenalin or defibrillation. Somewhere along the way, though, they began attempting to resurrect deceased animals with their gloppy white formula; they finally succeed with a dog named Rocky.

Champagne all around.

But Rocky has come back ... ah ... different: warier, stronger and more aggressive. (Cue strong memories of Stephen King’s vastly superior Pet Sematary ... and I mean the book, not the lousy 1989 film adaptation.) Clay spouts the pseudo-scientific gibberish that “explains” this transformation: Thanks to the injected glop, Rocky’s brain is building massive neural networks, moving well past the usual limits of his species. Or some such nonsense.

Not sure why that would make him so violent, but hey, I’m no brain surgeon. (Neither is anybody in this movie. Obviously.)