scubergmu

Have you ever seen a movie that you find entertaining, but also ridiculous at the same time? People usually refer to those movies as guilty pleasures. Well with its very accomplished cast, good production quality, beautiful setting & perfectly fine acting performances, this movie is not a typical guilty pleasure, like say Road House or Iron Eagle. No I put The Runaway Jury in that category despite all the positive qualities listed. For it was all nevertheless centered around a court case that's just mindless and insulting.

Aside from the details of the court case, I did like all of the other elements of the movie. Gene Hackman made for an awesome villain. John Cusack was well cast, with the actor's oddly likable persona being a key element of the character. I also love how John Grisham always sets his novels in the south, in places like Memphis and Savannah. The movie versions always do a great job of establishing the beautiful look and feel of these places, and it really does add something. It is a nice break from the big, urban settings of most legal dramas. The few action scenes in the movie were well done and pretty intense. I even found myself pretty choked up at the end, as we heard stories of awful gun violence, and the families that they affected. But that just brings me back to the conclusion that I am supposed to draw, that the gun companies are liable. And I just don't go along with that. The original John Grisham novel "The Runaway Jury" was all about a civil case against some big tobacco company. But before they could turn that bestseller into a box office hit, the amazing, unprecedented, groundbreaking scenario of the book actually happened. The screenwriters then had to change the villains to keep it original, and they settled on gun manufacturers. But guns are not chemically addictive like cigarettes are, and that is the crux of the whole case against big tobacco. What on earth were they thinking making gun manufacturers the bad guys? Look I'm all for gun laws that order background checks on buyers, to keep guns from people with a history of criminal records or mental illness (like Cho Seung-Hui). But at the same time, I don't see how gun makers should pay millions of dollars to victims of gun crimes. I also don't believe that companies producing forks should be sued when people die of obesity-related illnesses.

So hey, at least we can all agree that we hate cynical, well-funded bad guys who try and control the judicial process by manipulating the formulation of juries. Those people deserve to go to jail. People who pick up guns and fire them at innocent people deserve to go to jail. The people who made the gun involved in such a crime didn't do anything wrong. The Runaway Jury had a lot going for it, but its central message was just off the wall. What ever happened to personal responsibility, huh?