User Reviews

When Annie Laird is selected as a juror in a big Mafia trial, she is forced by someone known as "The Teacher" to persuade the other jurors to vote "not guilty".

He threatens to kill her son if she doesn't commit. When the trial is over, he can't let her go...

There are two big problems with this movie, they should have trimmed the ending by at least ten minutes, and Baldwin should not have got his motivation from the T-1000.

There are times when he is so autonomous, you can almost hear the mechanics grinding in the background, which is a shame, because in the first act, he is really convincing, but when we find out he's the Teacher, it's as if he's expecting the audience to want him go that little more Psychotic.

Moore is as good as she always is, convincing as the parent who is worried for her son's well being. But when Baldwin and Moore are on screen together, it just doesn't convince. You do think every now and again that they will get together at the end, but thats only because the fear factor that Baldwin had in the first act vanishes.

Gandolfini is great in this movie though, and shows what a talent he is. Just a shame he isn't in the movie a lot more.

There is some good camera-work and good performances, even from your token mobsters, who look like extras from Goodfellas.

It's not a bad film, entirely watchable, just not plausible enough.

This film is a great demonstration of why Demi Moore didn't have a more successful career as a top-level actress, though whether it was the fault of Moore or society is open for debate. She's a capable enough performer, but she lacks the ability to project either vulnerability or likability. With the former, you can trade on an audience's sympathy. With the latter, you can paper over the problems in a script or a production with your own charm. Moore's weaknesses are so clear in The Juror because she fails first at playing the victim and then can't entice the viewer to overlook the obvious melodramatics of the film's conclusion. She also stands exposed when compared to her co-star Alec Baldwin. He himself has always suffered from a lack of likability, especially in his dramatic roles, but Baldwin can manage a bit of vulnerability. His cold-blooded, criminal mastermind here is far more open and inviting than Moore's ordinary woman and mother.

It's especially a shame because a different actress, one without Moore's emotional blind spots, could have raised this movie up from being slightly better than average and made it a truly thrilling thriller. Anne Heche is a perfect example, playing as she does a supporting role to Moore's lead. There's an unguarded energy to her acting that makes her characters so much more appealing than Moore's, who cannot radiate the same kind of joy and ease as an essential contrast to the more sullen and terrifying moments in the story. I'll confess to being more a fan of Heche than Moore, but I think my argument is supported by examining the roles and quality of work done by each woman in the years after The Juror.

Annie Laird (Demi Moore) is a sculptress and single mother to Oliver (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who essentially talks her way onto the jury of a major Mafia trial. That leads to her being targeted and manipulated by the brilliantly evil "Teacher" (Alec Baldwin), a Mafia associate who demands that Annie produce a not guilty verdict. She succeeds, only to find that the twisted romantic obsession of "Teacher" is far more dangerous than any aspect of organized crime.

Putting aside Moore's deficiencies as the star of the show, this is a pretty good flick up until and ending that goes over-the-top and all the way to Guatemala. With James Gandolfini as a gangster that serves as sort of a midpoint between Annie's normality and the psychopathic nature of "Teacher", Ted Tally's screenplay put a lot of mostly effective effort into building an interesting dynamic between his two leads. And in the relationships between "Teacher" and other mobsters, Tally defuses the super-villain aura around his bad guy and makes him both more believable and more frightening because of that.

And when Moore is able to play Annie as a strong and defiant person, her strengths as an actress shine through. Which brings up the point of why a woman can't build a career on playing strong, aggressive characters on screen? There's a legion of men in Hollywood history who duplicated Moore's lack of accessibility or possessed even worse flaws in their craft, yet were able to prosper in roles that didn't require or disguised their faults. But at least in American cinema, female roles are defined almost entirely by vulnerability, likability or f**kability. Moore has the last in spades but admirable avoided that career path. Maybe the problem isn't in Moore, dear friends, but in ourselves.

All in all, I like The Juror enough to give it a mild recommendation. Heche does get naked in it and that's more than enough to tip the scales to the good for me.

Not too bad. It begins with a situation any experienced movie maven is likely to regard as stock. A representative of the mob, Alex Baldwin, contacts a juror, Demi Moore, in a murder case against mob boss Tony Lo Bianco. Baldwin informs Moore that she has a very fine son. He'll stay healthy as long as Moore sees to it that the jury brings in the verdict of not guilty.

The rest could have been written by the numbers twenty or thirty years ago, but now is not then. The all-powerful mob has been done to death and it must now be portrayed as in decline, slowly being edged out by the Calle cartel and other organizations of that ilk.

A further novelty is the casting of Alex Baldwin as Vince, the smooth-talking enforcer. He doesn't look particularly Italian. He doesn't wear suits of raw silk. He doesn't use double negatives. He ends his gerunds with a pronounced "g" -- "going" instead of "goin'".

Baldwin's part is a complex one. He begins as another tool of the Mafia, although his relationship with them is properly ambivalent. He manipulates Demi Moore into complying with his demands through a fluid set of threats and fake concerns about her and her family. As in, "Please, I beg you, don't make me kill your son." To put an end to any doubt, Baldwin picks up Moore's best friend, Anne Heche, to whom Moore has spilled every bean available. He beds her and then smiles as he forces her at pistol point to swallow a lethal dose of barbiturates.

Then he appears genuinely to fall in love with Moore. Their tense bond has been, as he puts it, like a marriage. Tearfully, but still manfully, he says, "I'm sorry you hate me, Annie, because I really do love you." As I said, the emotions behind his role are always in process, but Baldwin manages to pull it off.

He may be right on both counts. He loves her, true, but she really DOES hate him. After she finagles a not guilty verdict out of the other jurors, she hates him enough to cooperate with the cops and betray him to his Mafia bosses.

The good fellas try to whack him but he's a clever guy and sees to their demise instead. I mean, you know he's clever because he's pronouncing all those "g"s. Probably graduated from Reed College.

But, having discovered Moore's betrayal, he displays a vengeful persona never before shown. Moore is trying to hide her son in a remote Guatamalan village. Baldwin flies to Guatamala to kill the kid, Moore in another airplane right behind him. There is a final shoot out, naturally, that leaves a few loose ends dangling. That climactic character of Baldwin's is strictly by the book. Any subtlety we've seen earlier is all gone. He's just another bloodthirsty villain to be outwitted. Moore has to kill Baldwin, naturally -- but not before he tries to sneak a hidden pistol out of his ankle holster. We can't have the heroine shoot him down in cold blood. Anything but that.

Demi Moore has always been kind of a puzzle to me. She can act, but lots of people her age can act. She's never been in an outstanding movie and she's not staggeringly beautiful, not exotic in any way, yet her career goes on. That's okay. I'm not complaining. I only wish there were more to be seen on the screen. She has a husky voice, a strong splanchnocranium, hard eyes, and a neck of substance. It fits the part. The role hardly calls for an hysterical weeper with spindly limbs.

The film is nicely textured. We see the friendships and the tensions within and between groups. We see uncertainty, ambiguity, a nebulous patchwork of values that we innocents would be hard put to deal with.

"The Juror" is largely a conventional thriller, and it's also too protracted (113 minutes) for its one-note story, but it's professionally done, and elevated by a very good cast. As the villain, Alec Baldwin gets to chew the scenery at times, but at other moments he gives his role an almost disturbing complexity; when he tells Demi's character that he loves her, despite the monstrous things he has done, you believe him. A deglamorized Demi Moore is convincing, and then we have James Gandolfini as Baldwin's family-man associate, Anne Heche as Moore's best friend, Tony Lo Bianco as a Mafia boss, and others in smaller parts. They make this otherwise predictable studio product worth seeing. **1/2 out of 4.

If you have two hours to kill (or whack, in the mob nomenclature), then feel free to watch The Juror, a brain-dead thriller that is best witnessed on TV (you don't have to pay for it and you can pretty-much tell when the cussing, sex, and bloodletting are being snipped out).

It's an easy synopsis, here--mob boss orders a hit, Alec Baldwin carries it out, there's a trial, Demi Moore gets threatened in order to keep her from voting "guilty," biff-boom-bang.

By the end, there are lots of bullet holes in the bad guys, Moore has turned from cutesy artist to Dirty Harriet, and, if you're an Anne Heche or Alec Baldwin fan, you are wondering if you should rent this nonsense to see what all happened in the sack.

Since I am neither, I'll stick with the butchered-for-TV version and hope that not all juries are as stupid as the one Demi served on.

**SPOILERS** If you don't take the film "The Juror" seriously you can actually find it quit entertaining in just how unintentionally funny and campy it really is. You begin to notice that there's something very strange in the film after the person big shot Mafia bigwig Louie Boffano aka the big Spaghetti-O , Tony La Bianco, whom Juror #1 Annie Lierd, Demi Moore, was blackmailed into getting off on a murder charge got acquitted. Boffano was charged in ordering the execution style slaying of fellow Mafia boss Salvator "Big Sal" Riggio and his grandson Tommy who just happened to be an innocent bystander.

It seemed that "Big Sal" was deadly serious in being against the Mafia, or his fellow Mafia Don Louie Boffano, in making a deal with the Colombian Cali Drug Cartel which in effect had him whacked. With Boffano now acquitted he, and his goons, still keep blackmailing Annie which can only attract attention on them which is something they don't need or want. The guy doing most of the blackmailing is Vincent "The Teacher", Alec Baldwin, who freelances as a hit-man for the Boffano Family between affairs with those, women of course, whom he's blackmailing like Annie. And in the case of Annie's good friend the awfully cute and brainy Juiet (Anne Heche), who's a doctor by profession, "The Teacher" in keeping himself in shape, in his job as a professional hit-man, murders!

"The Teacher" under orders from the mentally deranged and reality challenged Louie Boffano, who doesn't seem to realize that all this is totally unnecessary, keeps putting the screws on both Annie and her 12 year old son Oliver, Joseph Gordon Levitt, which leads Annie to take matters into her own hands. Annie secretly sets up the so full of himself "Teacher" in getting him to admit, on a tape recorder she had hidden, that he and the Cali Cartel are planning to take over Louie Boffano's Mafia operations with him-know to his friends as "Crazy Louie"-getting iced in the process!

****SPOILER ALERT****The film goes from the ridicules to the sublime as were shockingly shown just how off the all "The Teacher" and his boss Louie Boffano really are. After "The Teacher" was set up by his good friend, and flunky in the Boffano Family, "Good Time" Eddie, James Gabdolfini, to be rubbed out he turns the tables on them only to, like his boss Louie Boffano, still blackmail Annie in him threatening to murder her her son Oliver for what seems like just for the thrill of it!

The unbelievable ending takes place in of all places the jungles of Guatemala in South America where Annie with the help of her boyfriend Boone played by a hippie looking Matt Craven-a fellow artist and sculptor like herself-is hiding Oliver by keeping him from getting killed by "The Teacher". It was "The Teacher" in overestimating his obviously low intelligence as well as underestimating Annie's determination, of getting him out of her hair as well as life, who ends up getting all that's coming to him! Which he should have gotten a lot sooner! A big D minus in plain old common sense by him not knowing when to quite when he was in fact way ahead!

The Juror is one of those movies I saw a long time ago and moderately liked and (tried) to watch again recently and couldn't get through 5 minutes.

I really think there are just some movies that cannot be viewed more then once and this is one. I personally couldn't remember much about it thus my wanting to see it again-usually a really good movie CAN be viewed multiple times or at least twice. There was a lot of overacting in this as well-everyone just tries to hard and once you know what's coming in this, it's tough to sit through a second time.

Still, it isn't at all the worst movie out there-and this is liked by many I know. Any major fans of this movie may want to check out a movie that's similar in plot but lesser known: "trial by Jury" that, to me rates slightly better then The Juror although not by much. The story lines are very similar.

I'm surprised at the low IMDb rating for this film, because I think it's one of the better suspense films to be made. Perhaps it's because Demi Moore has lost her popularity, but this is a film to be savored.

The overall script is pretty believable -- a mob boss is going to trial for murder, and Moore is the one juror his compatriots select to tamper with. Unfortunately, they choose a rather sick and obsessed colleague to deal with her -- Alec Baldwin. Moore succumbs to their threats in order to protect her son. Baldwin develops an obsessive love for Moore, and will do ANYTHING to have his way with her. After she "throws" the trial, Baldwin is not done with Moore...or her son. The climactic scene is especially taut.

Demi Moore is great here...one of her best roles. Alec Baldwin, however, makes the film as the sleazy and obsessed lover/killer...he's truly evil here! James Gandolfini is pretty average as a gang member. Joseph Gordon-Levitt shines as the young son; he was a comer even as a child star (and his potential is more obvious today). Anne Heche...well, I never saw the attraction...and still don't. Tony Lo Bianco was good as the crime boss. Although his role was small, it was nice to see Michael Constantine as the judge.

The exotic finale in Guatemala is an added treat.

Highly recommended! A strong "7".

Very long winded movie that dragged and dragged, the only thing keeping me engaged was Demi Moore's ever changing appearance. Then just as you think the story is over, think again. We take a pointless trip to the jungle to be greeted by some mad apaches from Guatemala. Why? Just why?