A woman is accused of killing her husband. After learning he faked his death, she breaks out of prison to find him and get her son back.
On her tail is a veteran parole officer who begins to question her guilt...
I have been circling a couple of ideas for mini-runs on the blog. One idea I was circling were 80s-90s thrillers. I tried to boil it down to a key theme, but I could not fixate on a set genre or series of conventions: should I look at courtroom thrillers? government conspiracy? serial killer? erotic?
One thing I noticed was how Ashley Judd’s name kept cropping up - I had forgotten how she had carved a niche for herself as a lead in mid-budget studio thrillers with high concepts.
Double Jeopardy might be the one with the longest tail, at least in terms of its central premise.
I remember the trailer for this movie coming out and people making of fun of the premise - I seem to remember a lot of conversations in the years since its release of people pointing out how poor its legal understanding is.
If this movie were better and made even half a decade earlier, then it might have been able to survive.
This movie is kind of disappointing. Maybe it is a bit early to reveal my overall thoughts, but there is no cutting it with this one.
It feels by-the-numbers from top to bottom. The execution is fairly pedestrian, with some clumsy uses of slow motion that I could not ignore.
Even Tommy Lee Jones's casting feels like a cliche - he is playing a role that feels like a distaff version of Sam Gerard.
He is watchable but the performance feels more like a rehash than a fresh
spin. His casting also felt like a fatal flaw, since it just highlights how great The Fugitive is.
It also seemed like this movie feels a few years too late. Aside from The Fugitive, it feels like a blander re-run of the kinds of man-on-the-run, domestic-bliss-gone-to-hell thrillers that were popular in the late 80s and early 90s.
This movie is rated R, but it just comes off too clean and sanitised. This woman's whole world is turned upside down, but aside from Judd's performance, I never felt the jeopardy (har har) of her situation.
I will say, I picked this movie because Ashley Judd was in it, and I am glad she was because she was kind of the guiding star through the blandness.
Focusing on Judd, I really enjoyed her performance. She is a little too intelligent to play the young ingenue bride, but once the character has gone through her prison sentence, she really clicks.
I like angry Judd - she has a terseness and sarcastic edge that works for the character. I wish the movie was a bit smarter and complicated. Her escape from justice and tracking down of her ex husband is the most enjoyable part of the movie.
Bruce Greenwood is such a great actor, and I had totally forgotten that he was in this. There is a grizzled gravitas to him that has made him great for authority figures and presidents. Every time he speaks it sounds like he just came in off a prairie. There is a weird decency to him that should be boring, but there seems to be a self-awareness to him that makes him magnetic.
To cut to the chase, I was looking forward to seeing that quality subverted here. He was also far younger than I had seen in other roles - I was expecting it to be more of a noir set up, with Greenwood as a homme fatal ala Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. This movie has no time for character - Greenwood does a good job here but he is a bit limited by the cookie-cutter bad guy role.
A cookie cutter thriller with some solid performances, Double Jeopardy is perfect Netflix fare. Take that whatever way you want.
No comments:
Post a Comment