7 / 10
Official trailer
A Verdict for Sale
A disgruntled former employee walks into a New Orleans brokerage and opens fire, killing several people, including a young father. Two years later, his widow sues the company that made the gun, and the case could cost the entire firearms industry billions. So the industry calls in Rankin Fitch.
Fitch, played by Gene Hackman, is a jury consultant, and his methods are ruthless. He runs a high-tech operation from a warehouse full of screens, profiling every potential juror, digging into their pasts, bugging their homes and finding the pressure points he can use to control their votes. He doesn’t care about guilt or innocence. He sells verdicts, and he’s very, very good at it. The gun companies are paying him a fortune, and he expects to earn it by the end of the first week.
Then a mysterious woman named Marlee contacts both sides with an offer. She can deliver the jury’s verdict to whoever pays the most. Her partner is sitting inside the jury box, and at first, nobody knows which one he is.
Runaway Jury is pure fun for me, a slick legal thriller that doesn’t make a lick of sense and knows it. I could watch Gene Hackman snarl at a wall of monitors all afternoon. It gets a 7 because the fun runs on charm and star power, and the plot falls apart the moment I poke at it.
Hackman
Hackman plays Fitch with a relish that’s great fun to watch. He’s arrogant, contemptuous, profane and brilliant at his job, barking orders at his team of analysts and treating jurors as data points. When he’s told he’s being played, his fury is magnificent.
It was one of Hackman’s last major roles before he retired, and he’s in top form. Fitch is a villain, but he’s a gleefully entertaining one, and Hackman makes you enjoy every minute he’s on screen, even when you’re rooting against him. Fitch is my favorite kind of villain, the guy who’s smarter than everybody in the building and enjoys it. Hackman never asks us to feel sorry for him. He’s having a ball being awful, and I’m having a ball watching him do it.
For Writers
Fitch treats jurors as data points, profiling and manipulating them from a high-tech control room full of screens. The villain’s method is chillingly clinical.
A villain whose methods feel modern and systematic can be far more frightening than one who relies on brute violence. The reader recognizes the tools, surveillance, data, profiling, from the real world, and the menace feels uncomfortably close.
Hackman’s Fitch works because he’s so good at his job and enjoys it so openly, so much. A villain’s competence, shown in detail, makes the hero’s victory feel hard-won. If Fitch were sloppy, beating him would mean nothing. Because he’s brilliant, the reader relishes every move against him. Writing Heroes and Villains goes into this in detail.
Hoffman
Dustin Hoffman plays Wendell Rohr, the widow’s lawyer, a folksy, principled New Orleans attorney who believes in the jury system and hates everything Fitch stands for. He’s warm, rumpled and shrewd, and Hoffman plays him with a gentle, stubborn decency.
The film’s most famous scene brings the two stars together for the first time in their long careers.
Hackman and Hoffman had been roommates as struggling young actors decades earlier, and they’d never shared the screen. When they finally do, in a courthouse bathroom, they argue about ethics, law and the nature of justice, and the scene crackles. It’s two old masters sparring, and it’s the best scene in the film.
That bathroom scene is the reason I’d put this film on again. Two old pros who’d waited decades to share a frame trade shots about justice in a courthouse bathroom, and neither one gives an inch. I’d have happily sat through another ten minutes of it.
Nick and Marlee
John Cusack plays Nick Easter, an easygoing video-game store clerk who gets himself selected for the jury and then, secretly and cleverly, begins steering the other jurors. Rachel Weisz plays Marlee, his partner, who handles the negotiations, calling Fitch and Rohr and naming her price: ten million dollars.
Cusack and Weisz are both charming, and the film keeps their motives hidden until late in the trial.
Are they con artists out for a payday? Or is something else going on? The mystery of who they are and what they really want drives the plot. Cusack’s easy, slightly goofy charm makes Nick hard to read, and Weisz gives Marlee a coolness that hides something raw underneath.
For Writers
The film hides Nick and Marlee’s motives for almost the whole trial. The mystery of what they really want keeps the audience guessing.
Keeping a character’s true motive hidden can drive a story, as long as the reader is given enough to stay interested. Each scene should raise a new, sharper question about what the character is really after.
The reveal works best when it reframes everything that came before. When Nick and Marlee’s revenge motive comes out, their earlier actions suddenly make emotional sense, and the audience wants to watch it all again. A well-hidden motive is a promise of a second, richer reading, and readers love to collect on it.
The Jury Room
The scenes inside the jury room are some of the film’s most entertaining. Nick works on his fellow jurors, charming some, befriending others and isolating the ones who might vote against him. Meanwhile, Fitch tries to manipulate the same jurors from outside, through blackmail, threats, bribes and a search of Nick’s apartment that turns up far less than Fitch hoped. Marlee, meanwhile, fights off an intruder in her own home with startling ferocity.
This is a battle for twelve people’s minds, fought on two fronts, and the film makes it tense and funny. Watching Nick outmanoeuvre Fitch’s team, and Fitch strike back, is the main pleasure of the film. The supporting jurors, played by actors including Jennifer Beals and Bill Nunn, are quickly sketched but vivid.
I think the jury room is where the film proves its worth. Watching Cusack work his fellow jurors with that goofy grin while Fitch’s people fumble around outside is a blast. I’d have liked a few more scenes with the jurors themselves, who get sketched in nicely and then pushed to the side.
Tobacco to Guns
The source is John Grisham’s 1996 novel, about a lawsuit against a tobacco company. The filmmakers changed it to the gun industry, partly because The Insider had recently covered tobacco and partly to make the story more topical.
The change works, and it gives the story a fresh target. It gives the trial higher emotional stakes, since the case is about a mass shooting, and it lets the film engage with the debate about gun manufacturers’ responsibility without becoming a lecture. It’s also, of course, completely unrealistic about how such a case would unfold.
The Twist
Eventually we learn Nick and Marlee’s real motive, and it’s a satisfying twist. Years earlier, their hometown suffered a school shooting that killed Marlee’s sister, and the town lost a lawsuit against the gun company after Fitch rigged the jury. Their whole scheme is a revenge operation, designed to beat Fitch at his own game.
The payoff is neat and emotionally effective. Nick and Marlee never intended to sell the verdict. They wanted Fitch to pay, try to buy the jury, and then lose. It makes the whole film play differently on a second viewing, and it gives the ending real bite.
For Writers
Nick and Marlee’s scheme turns out to be revenge against Fitch for rigging an earlier trial. The twist turns a con into a quest for justice, and a pair of hustlers into avengers.
A late revelation that recasts apparently selfish, greedy characters as righteous ones can be deeply satisfying. The reader has doubted them for two hours, and now finally understands them.
Plant small clues along the way, a hint of grief, a flash of anger, a detail about a hometown, so that the revelation feels earned instead of convenient.
The best twists are the ones the reader could have guessed, and didn’t. That near miss makes the reveal so satisfying. I cover this in more depth in my piece on plot devices that work and those that wreck a story.
Preposterous and Fun
Don’t mistake Runaway Jury for a realistic legal drama. The jury-tampering operation is wildly exaggerated, the courtroom procedure is loose and the notion that one juror could steer a verdict so completely is hard to swallow. The surveillance technology, all glowing screens and instant data, is pure Hollywood.
I have to knock it down a peg for that. I’ll swallow a lot in a thriller, but one juror steering eleven people like a puppeteer asks more than I want to give, and the glowing-screen surveillance looks silly now. It’s the main thing holding the film at a 7. But the film knows it’s a thriller, and it’s fast, slick and entertaining. Gary Fleder directs with energy, the New Orleans setting adds atmosphere and the cast holds it together.
Real Jury Consultants
Jury consultants are real, and they became a growing industry in the decades before the film. They help lawyers select jurors, run mock trials and study how different types of people might react to evidence. What they don’t generally do is bug jurors’ homes, blackmail them or run a warehouse full of surveillance screens.
Fitch is a fantasy version of the profession, a nightmare of what it could become without rules. That exaggeration is part of the fun, and it also gives the film its paranoid edge. In a world of data and surveillance, the thought that someone could predict and control twelve ordinary people doesn’t feel completely absurd.
New Orleans
New Orleans is both setting and shooting location, and the city gives it atmosphere: steamy courthouses, grand old houses, crowded bars and streets full of music. Rohr’s slow Southern charm fits the place, and Fitch’s cold, high-tech operation feels like an invasion from somewhere else.
The setting also adds to the film’s sense of a place where deals are made behind closed doors and the powerful play by their own rules. The city makes a fine backdrop for a story about a corrupted trial.
Fitch’s Comeuppance
The film’s final scene belongs to Nick, Marlee and Fitch. After the verdict, they confront him in a bar, show him evidence of everything he’s done and tell him exactly how they beat him. They demand that he retire, or they’ll expose him.
Hackman plays Fitch’s defeat beautifully, the arrogance draining from his face as he realizes he’s been outplayed. The moment satisfies, the villain brought down by his own methods, a neat, crowd-pleasing finish.
The Lawyers
Jeremy Piven plays Lawrence Green, Rohr’s slick young colleague, and Bruce McGill plays the judge, a crusty, irritable man who suspects something’s wrong with his jury. Bruce Davison plays Durwood Cable, the gun company’s courtroom lawyer, a smooth operator who does as Fitch tells him.
None of them get much depth, but they fill out the courtroom with recognizable faces, and McGill in particular is fun as a judge who knows he’s being played and can’t prove it.
A Question of Motive
What lifts the film above standard Grisham fare is its interest in the jury system itself.
Rohr believes in it. Fitch believes it can be bought. Nick and Marlee prove both of them partly right. The film’s argument, underneath the thrills, is that juries are vulnerable to manipulation. The only protection is people with a conscience.
The argument isn’t deep, and it’s delivered with a lot of Hollywood gloss. But it gives the film a little more weight than it strictly needs, and it makes Hackman’s cynicism and Hoffman’s idealism feel like more than just positions in a plot.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Its thriller is a battle for twelve minds, with a ruthless manipulator on one side and two mysterious players on the other. Hiding their true motive keeps the audience guessing until the end.
A hidden motive can sustain a whole plot, if the reveal recasts everything that came before.
Decide what your mysterious character really wants, and plant enough clues that the reveal feels inevitable in hindsight.
Hackman Meets Hoffman
I give Runaway Jury a 7, and I’m happy with that number.
Gene Hackman is gleeful as a jury fixer, Dustin Hoffman makes a lovely, stubborn opponent, their bathroom showdown is the best scene, and the twist works. I’d rate it higher if the plot held up to thirty seconds of thought, and it doesn’t. I don’t much care. It’s a slick, cheerfully preposterous ride, and I’d take it over a dozen more plausible legal dramas.
