Runaway Jury might look like a typical courtroom drama, but it's not. It's based on a John Grisham novel, but it's not the kind of movie in which the good and noble lawyer stays up late trying to crack the secret to his case on the night before the big cross-examination, poring over documents, clapping his hands in a flash of insight, then reducing his witness to a smoldering heap with the Best Speech Of His Career, thus saving the day. No, this movie isn't much interested in the details of the case; it's interested in the jury's decision afterward. But it also doesn't care about straightforward jury deliberations. No, this is Twelve Angry Men for the cynical 21st century, where lawyers are puppets, verdicts are tradable commodities, and jurors are pawns of forces they don't even know exist. Runaway Jury is a power struggle within the tightly confined spaces of the New Orleans French Quarter, quick and smart and expertly balanced.
Several movies this year have focused on con-men, but where Matchstick Men and Intolerable Cruelty each become enamored with a single con and then sit back to bask in its cleverness, Runaway Jury sustains its energy by piling con upon con and power shift upon power shift. This movie could have become a cat and mouse game where the mouse tries to figure out who the cat is for most of the movie, but this mouse figures that out pretty quickly, in the simplest way — someone taps someone else on the hand — and he moves on from there. This also isn't the kind of movie where the person pulling the strings speaks witticisms into a telephone while the manipulated party scrambles to trace the call. No, this manipulated party hangs up the phone and pulls some strings of his or her own, forcing the other side to make a move in response. These characters do gives speeches and trace calls, but they know that such opening salvos won't sink the opponent's ship.
The pace of the editing is too fast for my tastes, but as long as the characters are thinking just as quickly, I can tolerate it. I do wonder why someone would bother to play both sides in this case when blackmailing just the rich side would have been simpler. The only explanations I've come up with are that "simpler" is not what these filmmakers were going for and playing both sides gives Dustin Hoffman's character a chance to grandstand. The movie turns surprisingly sentimental in the end and takes a preachy stance on gun control that spoils a little of the fun, and Hoffman, despite having a great argument with Gene Hackman, is a bit too Southern-fried-folksy most of the time. But the movie's real momentum is driven by characters using their wits, which I like quite a bit.