TRIAL BY JURY has quite a bad reputation. It has a score of 5,3 and only 20 reviews to date, all this would lead to a terrible movie. As for me, I decided to watch it the day it was announced that William Hurt died and I had to celebrate his career somehow.
Valerie Alston (Joanne Whalley) is a juror on jury duty in a trial where Daniel Graham (Gabriel Byrne) is determined to put crime boss Rusty Pirone (Armand Assante) behind bars. After a failed trial Pirone sends an henchman, former cop Tommy Vesey (Hurt) for trying to get off his charges, and Vesey will warn Valerie that unless she cooperates the Pirone family will murder her son. So she hasn't any other choice than take her kid to grandpa (Stuart Whitman in one of his last movies) and hope that the jury votes her way while Vesey will have a change of heart and tries to protect Valerie.
With such an excellent cast full of well known names and that premise it could have been a good movie, right? Well, you are wrong. The plot was confusing most of the time and I thought they must have heavily edited it before the release, while the acting was probably the only good thing about this movie especially by Whalley and Hurt. The script too looked like it had lots of re-writes and at times the pacing was dull.
Overall, not that terrible but a misfire for the reasons mentioned above. There have been lots of great courtroom dramas and two years later they made a movie pretty much identical to this one but better: THE JUROR with Demi Moore and Alec Baldwin. This instead is only of interest if you are a fan of some members of the cast.
