Double Jeopardy (1999)
Starring: Ashley Judd, Tommy Lee Jones
Director: Bruce Beresford
Synopsis: A framed woman wreaks revenge on a conniving, scheming husband
Reviewed by: Omar Khan

 

Ashley Judd scored a bull's-eye with this hit thriller, catapulting herself into Hollywood's A-list of leading actresses. Following the moderately successful Kiss the Girls, Judd stars as a devoted wife and mother who awakens aboard her yacht drenched in the blood of her missing husband. The police discover her clutching the apparent murder weapon, and she is swiftly convicted of his murder.

Naturally, all is not quite as it seems.

Before long, she discovers that she has been the victim of an elaborate conspiracy and sets out to exact revenge on the man responsible for destroying her life.

The film is highly predictable and survives largely on the strength of its lead performances. Ashley Judd does a perfectly competent job, while Tommy Lee Jones lends proceedings a degree of credibility that the script scarcely deserves. Implausibilities abound and, because most of the plot developments can be seen coming a mile away, the film never generates the level of tension or suspense that a thriller of this nature so desperately requires.

The movie bears more than a passing resemblance to the rather putrid Sleeping with the Enemy, making it something of a surprise—and a disappointment—that a director of Bruce Beresford's calibre should have produced such a routine and uninspired thriller.

Perhaps the film's greatest offence, however, is Beresford's shameless lifting of a crucial sequence from George Sluizer's brilliant Dutch thriller The Vanishing (1988). The scene is reproduced with scarcely any attempt at disguise, making the plagiarism painfully obvious to anyone familiar with the original masterpiece.

Then again, neither Bruce Beresford, Ashley Judd nor Paramount were likely to lose much sleep over the critics. Despite receiving a fairly savage critical mauling, Double Jeopardy went on to become one of the surprise box-office successes of the autumn of 1999, grossing well in excess of $120 million in North America alone.

All in all, it is a tame, predictable thriller that shamelessly panders to its audience. It remains reasonably entertaining along the way, but never approaches the intelligence or sophistication it so clearly aspires to.

The film positively cries out for a Lollywood remake by our own "local Scorsese", Sangeeta.

More importantly, it serves as another reminder that enormous American box-office success is no longer any guarantee of quality. After all, these were the very same audiences who transformed the dreadful Runaway Bride, the interminable The Phantom Menace and the loathsome Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me into blockbuster hits, while far superior entertainments such as Lake Placid were left to scrape together little more than loose change.