Clint Eastwood | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

The new HBO Max movie “Juror #2” is about all that is wrong with the legal system in this country. People are often convicted for all the wrong reasons – including expediency due to the fact that once police investigators think they have found the right person, there is only so much money and time to investigate any situation thoroughly enough. For this one reason alone, way too many people – especially poor people are sent to jail or put on death row, even though they did nothing wrong.

Juror #2 is directed by Clint Eastwood, who is still directing movies at age 94, which according to records makes him the second oldest person to direct a film.

The screenplay for Juror #2 is a very good one about a man having an argument in a bar with his girlfriend during a rainy night and the girlfriend refuses a drive home with her boyfriend and is later found dead after falling off of a cliff. Several incorrect assumptions are made by the police and several witnesses and the boyfriend is arrested for murder. Later when the jury is selected, one of the jurors has significant knowledge of what happened to the woman that night.

Juror #2 has an excellent cast, including Nicholas Hoult as Justin Kemp (juror #2), Toni Collette as Faith Killebrew, the prosecuting attorney, Chris Messina as Eric Resnick the defense attorney, and J.K. Simmons who is excellent as a member of the jury, and a former police officer, who through some simple phone calls and research easily demonstrates major flaws in the police investigations of this alleged crime.

There are excellent courtroom scenes in this story, and along the way the expected ongoing conflicts that all lawyers face over winning a case at all costs against doing the right thing – to save the life of an innocent person.

Juror #2 is receiving very high 93% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and I agree with these ratings and recommend this movie.

At age 91, its impossible to believe that Clint Eastwood is still not only directing, but acting in movies. Considering his age, and the number of movies he can potentially still make, it is equally as hard to believe that he would choose a script as bad as “Cry Macho” to both direct and act in. What was he thinking with this waste of 2 hours?

This story is stunningly boring – mostly from the middle 85% where amazingly it seems like absolutely nothing is happening. This movie reminds me of the recent Liam Neeson movie “The Marksman”, where a man is on the run with a Mexican boy trying avoid a group of people out to kill them. Unfortunately most of this movie is about the boy and Eastwood’s character hanging around a farm, having dinner. As far as The Marksman it is an OK movie where Cry Macho is so boring that I almost left the theater several times.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for Cry Macho are a very low 50% and my rating is in the 30% range ranking this film as a must miss. This film should be called Cry Boring.