Double Jeopardy **
Rated on a 4-star scale Screening venue: Odeon (Liverpool City Centre) Released in the UK by UIP on January 28, 2000; certificate 15; 105 minutes; country of origin USA; aspect ratio 2.35:1
Directed by Bruce Beresford; produced by Leonard Goldberg. Written by Douglas S Cook, David Weisberg. Photographed by Peter James; edited by Wark Warner.
CAST..... Ashley Judd..... Libby Parsons Tommy Lee Jones..... Travis Lehman Bruce Greenwood..... Nick Parsons Annabeth Gish..... Angie Roma Maffia..... Margaret Davenia McFadden..... Evelyn
"Double Jeopardy" wants us to be amazed at the ingenuity of its gimmick, and enthralled by the emotion of its story. But the gimmick doesn't make any logical sense and the drama has all the power of a soppy TV movie. All that remains is an unremarkable thriller plot, which moves dully and mechanically toward a foregone conclusion.
Ashley Judd stars as Libby Parsons, an affluent young wife and mother who, while on a boating trip, wakes to find that her husband Nick has gone missing, and her cabin is covered in blood. There is a knife on the scene. There is no sign of anyone else's presence. Libby is convicted of Nick's murder and sent down.
While in prison, Libby discovers over the phone that Nick (Bruce Greenwood) is still alive, having faked his own death. So she behaves well, gets released on parole and determines to track her villainous spouse down, to be able to clear her name and get her son back. She steals a car from her parole officer, a sullen ex-law professor named Travis Lehman (Tommy Lee Jones), then dashes across America on her search. She feels comfortable about how to handle Nick when she finds him, because of something she's been told by a fellow jailbird: Under the 'double jeopardy' clause of the US constitution's fifth amendment, nobody can be convicted twice for the exact same crime -- so Libby can kill her husband and the law can't touch her for it.
Yes, this is the gimmick I was referring to, and it's not half as clever as the screenwriters seem to think. Since Nick is has been pronounced dead, you see, Libby would officially be killing someone else, and could of course be convicted. Besides, she would have to serve the remainder of her life sentence for violating her parole conditions -- they do not allow her to leave the state in which she resides or own a weapon of any kind, let alone get away with all the destruction of property she perpetrates over the course of her country-wide trek.
Travis is supposed to be chasing her all the while, but "Double Jeopardy" never develops into an effective game of cat-and-mouse, because we see very little from the pursuer's point of view. Most scenes just show Libby getting a little closer to finding Nick, then almost getting caught by Travis and having to scarper. We're supposed to be engaged by Libby's desire to find her son, but I don't know why -- although the film's opening passages do indeed show her enjoying maternal pastimes, they come across as the typical calm-before-the-storm moments that are present in every Hollywood thriller, rather than something for us to get passionately wrapped up in.
Judd holds her own rather well as the film's heroine, creating body language tough enough to convince us she's really survived an ordeal, yet preserving the tender gaze of a caring parent. Jones is okay, too, but he's played the same role before; in "The Fugitive", which was a great thriller, and its sequel "U.S. Marshals", which was certainly not. "Double Jeopardy" ranks somewhere in between those two films -- it's not amazing or annoying, just a pretty well put-together popcorn flick that's impossible to care a damn about.
COPYRIGHT(c) 2000 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
Please visit, and encourage others to visit, The UK Critic's website, which is located at http://members.aol.com/ukcritic
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews