To relax, I spend a lot of time watching true crime documentaries and fictional murder and crime TV series. You’d think that for a Law & Order fan, Clint Eastwood’s “Juror #2” would hit all my buttons, but this legal thriller was, for me, a thrill-less 114 minutes.

Eastwood, 94,  in what is likely his last film as director has assembled an able cast. Nicholas Hoult and Toni Collette have been paired together previously as mother and son in “About a Boy.” Here they are on different sides of the justice system. Collette places Faith Killebrew, the Assistant District Attorney, who is prosecuting the case that Justin Kemp (Hoult) has been selected to sit as a jury member. Justin doesn’t want to be there; his wife Ally (Zoey Deutch) is in the last few weeks of a high-risk pregnancy. The public defender Eric Resnick (Chris Messina) is an old friend of Faith’s, and his client James Michael Sythe (Gabriel Basso), has been accused of murdering his girlfriend after a very public argument at a bar. James left her to walk home in the rain. She was found  by a pedestrian the next day, dead under a bridge.

Once the trial begins, Justin remembers being at that bar that particular night. He was on that very bridge, stopping after he thought he hit a deer. It was dark and at no point do we understand that Justin knowingly hit a person (Francesca Eastwood as Kendall Carter) and left her to die. It was an unfortunate accident, but Justin has an unfortunate history of alcoholism.

When the case is left to the jury, the forewoman Denice (Leslie Bibb) asks for a show of hands as if peer pressure wasn’t a thing. As if we were in a different iteration of “12 Angry Men” Justin is the only one feeling a conversation needs to take place. Yet another juror, Harold (J.K. Simmons) turns out to be a former homicide inspector. Both he and Justin take measures that should have led to a mistrial. But this is a small town so the jury continues their talks without Harold as the alternate takes his place. One of the jurors, Keiko (Chikako Fukuyama), the only juror who speaks with a foreign accent, suggests that this wasn’t a case of domestic violence, but a case of hit-and-run.

When Justin speaks with his Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, Larry (Kiefer Sutherland) who is also an attorney, he’s persuaded to keep quiet about what he has witnessed and what he did.

One wonders just how the medical examiner could not differentiate between being beaten by a blunt object and being hit by a car. But perhaps I’ve been watching too much “CSI,” “NCIS” or “Bones.” Jonathan Abrams (“The Heart of Rock and Roll”) doesn’t build a very convincing narrative although he has convinced me to stay the heck out of Georgia. As director Eastwood sometimes uses wide-angle shots that deflate the tension and serve little purpose. Yet Hoult is convincing as an innocent man who realizes he is somehow complicit in a death and must wrestle with a decision to either step forward or at least convince a jury of an accused man’s innocence. Collette gives a hard-edge to Faith, while showing little faith in human kind, but shows how her re-awakened conscience wears down the sharpness into what might be humility. One wishes that Simmons and Sutherland had bigger roles.

“Juror #2”  does raise some intriguing questions but not in a convincing scenario. The film had its world premiere at AFI FEST (27 October 2024) and was the festival’s closing film. Eastwood did not appear at the screening and, for some reason, Warner Bros. YouTube trailer won’t embed on other websites.