The Juror (1996) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

The core ingredients of a good movie are present in The Juror. Alec Baldwin is intimidating as a soft-spoken, educated, high IQ hit man. Demi Moore is intimidated, then determined, as the victim of an intricate mafia plot. James Gandolfini is excellent as a low-level wise guy with a compassionate streak.

But the ingredients don't combine properly. The whole is less than the sum of its parts. Part of the problem is that the film sprawls over far too much landscape. In a character-based film, it's OK to stretch the film out over a long running time. When we are really into a character's life, we want to know more about them. In Lost in Translation, I wanted the film to be longer, not shorter. In Once Upon a Time in America, I want to see the original 10 hour cut. But a thriller with the typical implausible elements can't really be stretched ad infinitum. By the nature of the genre, each additional plot twist provides an additional strain on the credulity of the audience. People are willing to put up with one unlikely event, or two, but when it starts to get up near a dozen, well, people have a limited amount of patience, and there is a breaking point.

The original premise wasn't bad at all. A mob boss was on trial. Demi Moore was on the jury. Alec Baldwin played a psychotic mob enforcer who let Demi know that a "not guilty" vote was the only way to save her own life, and her son's. Just to demonstrate the vulnerability of the mother and son, Baldwin and Gandolfini kept popping up everywhere Demi turned, kind of like Waldo. You know the drill. She heads to a museum, Gandolfini is a guard. She goes to a ballgame, Gandolfini is selling hot dogs. She goes to a secluded mountain village in Guatemala, Baldwin is the local priest, speaking fluent Spanish with a proper Guatemalan accent.

OK, I exaggerated a little. That much of the film was actually quite reasonable by the standards of Hollywood thrillers. Demi got convinced that she was trapped and she just didn't know what to do.

But then things got crazy.

• It turns out that Baldwin didn't just want Demi to vote "not guilty". He also insisted that she had to convince the other 11 jurors of the innocence of the accused mobster, even though the guy had actually been recorded ordering the crime, and the prosecution had an airtight case. If she was unable to do so, it was to be curtains for her and the kid.
• It also turned out that Baldwin had no trouble getting into her guarded hotel room while she was sequestered.
• On top of all that, Baldwin also had bugs in the jury deliberation room, and heard every word.
• OK, so Demi managed to convince the jury. Not guilty.
• Then the mob boss was worried that Demi would waver after the trial, so Baldwin continued to intimidate her. He started out by fucking and killing Demi's best friend (Anne Heche). As far as I can see, that scene served no purpose in the film other than to expose Anne Heche's breasts. Now that I think about it, what better purpose could there be? Baldwin told a funny story on the talk show circuit about this scene. He claimed that Heche was 100% heterosexual until she did this sex scene with him, which turned her against men forever ... er ... temporarily.
• Then the plot got really crazy, with Demi double-crossing the DA after agreeing to co-operate, then double-crossing Baldwin by getting him caught in a mob war.
• Then the mob war, which consisted of Alec Baldwin against the Five Families, ended with every mobster in the NY/NJ area dead except Baldwin. He was one tough cookie.
• Then Baldwin, surviving the double-cross, and knowing that Demi had betrayed him, raced Moore to a remote hamlet in Guatemala, where Demi had stashed her son with a scientist who was studying local customs.
• Demi missed the plane to Guatemala, but she still managed to get there before Baldwin, by chartering a Guatemalan military plane and hiring the entire Guatemalan army to assist her. Baldwin, flush with his victory over the entire Mafia, was almost able to defeat the entire army of Guatemala as well, but finally lost when Demi broke the tie in O.T. by shooting him with a handgun.

If the script had stayed closer to the original premise, a one-on-one psychological thriller pitting Demi against Baldwin, and if the script had made Baldwin into more of an ordinary mortal man rather than a Lex Luthor clone, it might have been a good flick. It had some good moments, and some good ingredients.

As it was, it just piled on more and more incredible Baldwin accomplishments, and it was at the point where it needed the "too silly" guy from Monty Python to break up the sketch.