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DOUBLE JEOPARDY
Director: Bruce Beresford
Written by: Robert Benton
Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Ashley Judd,
Bruce Greenwood, Annabeth Gish
My Advice: Best as a rental
Rating:  out of
Libby Parsons (Judd) is a woman who has it all. A wonderfully
doting and generous husband, an adorable son, and a beautiful home. In fact she has everything a woman could possibly
want with one exception; a prison term.
Framed for the murder of her husband, a crime she did not commit,
she finally resigns herself to the fact that even though trapped by a cruel twist of fate, it's her fate, none
the less, and she must make peace with it. Authorizing the adoption of her son to a school teacher friend (Gish),
she begins to serve her time. It's during this period she comes to the startling realization that Nick is alive
and well and living a merry life with her son and her schoolteacher friend.
This is where things got troubling for me. I do love Judd. Her
performance was wonderful. She brought diversity to her character and she interacted well with all of the characters
around her but I just could not get past the "Fugitive " theme of this movie. Hadn't we seen all of this
before? Right down to her parole officer (Jones), but with Harrison Ford playing the lead?
The premise of this movie was a great one. Once convicted of
a crime you cannot stand trial for the same crime once more. As a result, Libby is free to track down her once
loving Nick, take possession of her son and then do away with the backstabbing lout unencumbered. In fact, she
could stuff him in a Cuisinart in the middle of the Superbowl and not a darned thing could be done about it. This
marvelous concept could have opened a whole lot of windows for this flick but I instead felt as if it closed a
few doors. It could have, and should have, been so much more.
I'm going with the "straddling the fence" review on
this one. I didn't hate it, I didn't like it. I was just somewhere comfortably in-between.
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