Film titles which promise much but do not deliver. There is no point in Runaway Jury where the twelve just and true ones decide they have had enough of this tedious trial mularkey and scarper from the box. Nowhere dow we see them being persued by the judge in his flappy robes, the prosecution and defence desperately trying to make their points to indict the evil gun trade. The idea of them riding the range in a old stagecoach as the stenographer desperately chases them down on a tempestuous stallion is so unlike the film that even thinking of it makes me want to pen a seperate movie.
Instead it is a bog standard courtroom drama, asking deep probing questions about the nature of justice in the US. It does not answer these questions, rather it is happy to fall back on the Gene Hackman playing a cynical old villain ruse. But it has got John Cusack in it and people of my generation can watch John Cusack in almost anything, especially here which could have also been called Ferris Bueller On A Jury. Thoughly watchable, thoroughly disposable, it comes to something when the only defining character trait Dustin Hoffman has is that he occasionally likes to spill food on himself to get the jury on his side. Oh and Rachel Weisz does yet another lousy US accent. You go girl.