Double Jeopardy (1999)

Director: Bruce Beresford                              Writers: David Weisberg & Douglas Cook
Film Score: Normand Corbeil                         Cinematography: Peter James
Starring: Ashley Judd, Tommy Lee Jones, Bruce Greenwood and Annabeth Gish

Double Jeopardy makes a valiant attempt at being an action movie, at being suspenseful, and at telling an engaging mystery story. Unfortunately the film can’t bear the weight of all the mistakes it makes and, as such, is a huge disappointment. Despite star power and a veteran director with two Oscar nominations, the screenplay is so incredibly bad that it drops like a rock tossed into Puget Sound. The set up is interesting enough, but it is over by the time the credits have finished. Ashley Judd and her businessman husband Bruce Greenwood live on the beautiful shores of Whidbey Island in Washington State, just north of Seattle. They have a small son, Benjamin Weir, and Greenwood is throwing a lavish party to raise money for his small school on the island. The boy’s teacher is Annabeth Gish, who also acts as something of a nanny for him. Judd has always wanted a particular sailboat and when Greenwood buys it for her they set out on the water that evening. The first head scratcher is when Judd is pointing out the geography while they are out of sight of land. She claims that while Alaska is to the north, and Japan is to the east, that the Straight of Juan de Fuca is off to the south of them, but the Straight runs slightly northwest and it couldn’t be south of them unless the were practically on top of Vancouver Island. Granted, that one depends on a knowledge of the setting, but there are plenty more to come that don’t.

After a night of romance and drinking Judd wakes up covered in blood like John Marley in The Godfather, but instead of a horse’s head she finds a trail of blood leading up to the deck and no Greenwood. She sees the bloody knife on the deck and, of course, she picks it up, just in time to have the coast guard arrive and see her with it. I realize that this film is already fifteen years old, but that was a tired trope even then and I think it’s time to retire it. Soon she’s thrown in jail, with no bail, and then brought to trial . . . even though Greenwood’s body has never been found! None of the trial preparation is shown at all. Suddenly we’re in the courtroom with her hearing a tape of Greenwood sending a distress call to the Coast Guard saying he’s been stabbed. Prosecutor Betsy Brantley tries for the sarcasm of Glenn Close in Jagged Edge, but the writing is so poor and juvenile that it’s actually embarrassing. Even with the tape, and the insurance policy, a murder conviction without a body is incredibly rare and so it doesn’t just strain credulity it utterly torpedoes any suspension of disbelief. But wait, there’s more. Since she doesn’t get the money, Judd begs Gish to adopt their son so that she’ll have access to the money in trust, and then is sent to prison. Again, however, the abysmal pacing destroys the story. Absolutely no time is taken to establish her relationship with the great Roma Maffia, who happens to have been a lawyer and holds the key to the title and the rest of the film.

When Judd hasn’t heard from Gish or her son in a month she makes a call to the school, pretending to be Gish and checking on the address for her “severance check.” First of all, there is no such thing as severance pay for teachers. And secondly, the school wouldn’t handle it even if there was. The state handles all of that from the teacher’s individual retirement fund. Anyway, Judd manages to find out Gish’s new address and phone number in San Francisco. She chews out Gish first, but when she’s talking to her son Greenwood walks in the door and he calls out, “Daddy,” which Judd hears. Now she knows he’s faked his death. Maffia, in another brief drive-by appearance, tells her to do her time quietly and try to get out on parole because of double jeopardy, which means no one can be tried twice for the same crime. “That means you can walk right up to him in Times Square, put a gun to his head and pull the trigger, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.” Wrong. When she gets out she’ll be on parole, which means that any violation of parole, including that gun, will send her right back to prison to finish her original sentence, I’m guessing, without another chance of parole. It’s maddening just how stupid this film is. So then she starts buffing up while she waits to get out, but she’s not Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, and when she’s done she looks just as skinny and fragile as when she went in. She doesn’t meet Tommy Lee Jones, the head of the halfway house, until after she gets out but by then it’s too late. The film is already a lost cause and it’s only a half hour old.

Ultimately the screenplay is the downfall of the film. David Weisberg had only written three films prior to this . . . and wasn’t able to sell another one for fifteen years, which makes sense considering how bad this one was. His partner on all of those previous films was, no surprise, Douglas Cook. What’s so mystifying about all of this is that the director, Bruce Beresford, didn’t demand that changes to the screenplay be made. Beresford actually earned an Academy Award nomination for his own screenplay on Breaker Morant, and another for his directing on Tender Mercies. In addition he was nominated for a Golden Globe for his direction of Driving Miss Daisy. In this film he seems to have gleefully purchased a ticket on the Titanic and decided to go down with the ship. Judd’s journey of revenge lurches along with no time to develop anything like concern for the characters including, ironically, Judd herself. Her miraculous escapes that Weisberg and Cook have written for her are as sophomoric as they are unbelievable, and Beresford just went ahead and filmed them. Tommy Lee Jones is wasted, Roma Maffia is wasted, and so is Bruce Greenwood, all of which renders the star power of the film moot. If you though the deus ex machina was working overtime in The Pelican Brief, you’ll want to steer well clear of Double Jeopardy.