6. Runaway Jury
What We Got: A fast-paced courtroom thriller... with a heavy-handed message.
What It Should've Been: A Fast-Paced Courtroom Thriller. Period. John Cusack, Rachel Weisz, Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman starring together in a gritty courtroom thriller? Great! Based off of a John Grisham story? Well, the star power sold me, at least. The movie moves easy and breezy through the ins and outs of high-profile courtroom politics, with Cusack and Weisz playing a juror and his girlfriend whose motivations for being in on a high-profile mass-shooting gun-rights trial run deep. Hackman and Hoffman are spectacular squaring off against each other as opposing sides in this trial of the century. So what is the problem? The story goes out of its way to be a Gun Control message movie. I'm going to avoid going into my own personal beliefs on this topic and not start a firestorm of Leftist and Rightist comment flame war on the subject, nonetheless there is a forum for this debate and shoe-horning it into an otherwise mainstream entraining hollywood court-room drama does it no service. What's more the 'debate' in this story is heavily weighted to one-side of the argument, the message to bluntly hammered into the audience leading to one of my worst pet-peeves in movies: The Lecture. As a slap in the face to the audience the movie has an oddly placed upbeat happy ending, where as in real life, the landscape of gun related violence seemingly has no good resolve in sight. Now there is a way to present this, and any, controversial topic in a movie or entertainment, just when it is in service to the tone of the rest of the story. Outside of the heavy-handed message the rest of movie is a typical breezy Grisham thriller, one that could've been better than 'The Firm' in my opinion if not for trying to weakly fit in a serious current issue.