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© 2000 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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