Fraters Libertas

Runaway Jury. Run Far, Far Away.

My invitation to the meeting of the century reached my inbox far too late to act upon last evening. As it happened, I was busy catching one of those new fangled moving picture shows at a local google-plex with the lovely Atomizerette. We quickly narrowed our choices down to Intolerable Cruelty, School of Rock and Runaway Jury.

Despite the fact that I have enjoyed every previously released Coen Brothers effort, I just wasn't in the mood for another romantic comedy even though it included Catherine Zeta-Jones. I also consider George Clooney to be a most reprehensible human being, so Intolerable Cruelty was out.

School of Rock looks mildly amusing, but it includes one thing I completely loathe in a film...cute kids. Can't stand 'em. Not even Jack Black's wacky antics can make up for these annoying little beasts. School of Rock...out.

That left the film adaptation of John Grisham's novel, Runaway Jury. I read The Firm years ago and my memory of seeing the film of the same name didn't make me want to retch, so I went into the theater with as open a mind as I have. Unfortunately, my mind closed like a bear trap when I discovered the message behind the movie.

Briefly, the story hinges around John Cusak's character who gets himself onto a jury and then proceeds to blackmail both attorneys with the promise that he can deliver them a favorable vote. It wasn't the story itself that pissed me off. In fact, it could have been quite a compelling tale. It was the implied morality of the sides involved that roused my ire.

You see, the case in question was a lawsuit against the evil gun manufacturers. The filmmakers never missed an opportunity to make the defendants into evil, soulless creatures who relished in each and every gun death as if they themselves fed on the blood shed from each victim. Their only concern was the bottom line and if people had to die for them to make a profit, so be it.

The plaintiffs, on the other hand, were portrayed as righteous, self-sacrificing humanitarians who were in it solely for the benefit of mankind. Money was of no concern to them. Justice had to be served and, of course, the "big gun companies" must get what they deserved. Included were the obligatory scenes of a shooting victim on video tape celebrating his son's birthday and the ultimate warm fuzzy scene of children frolicking on a playground while the protagonists look on with tear filled eyes.

It was pervasive and utterly transparent and it ruined a movie that I thought had so much potential. I expressed these views to the lovely Atomizerette several times during the film and she dismissed my complaints with an eye roll (I get those all the time) and the comment that it was only a movie. Yeah, it's only a movie. It's only a movie that had almost 9 million dollars in ticket sales last weekend. That's a lot of people in the seats, many of whom left the theater thinking that gun companies are the greatest of all satans.

The kicker is that in the novel, it was a suit against the equally hated but less evocative evil of big tobacco that was the centerpiece of the story. I guess the opening scene of a man slowly dying of lung cancer wouldn't have been as powerful as a disgruntled former employee shooting up his former employer's office. Instead of focusing on the story line, the filmmakers took the easy way out and injected a sure-fire emotional aspect into it. I get enough of that crap watching the news. I don't want to have to sit through it at the theater as well.