Double Jeopardy

December 11, 2004

Rated: R Runtime: 106 min Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

My expectations going into this movie were that it would be a ho-hum action movie, but at the very least I’d get to see a decent performance by Tommy Lee Jones. What I saw was much more than that, this is actually a pretty darn good movie.

Ashley Judd plays Elizabeth Parsons, the wife of a seemingly nice guy who as revealed in the previews, isn’t so nice after all. He fakes his death and in the process frames her as the murderer. She gets convicted, goes to jail and later finds out that he’s still alive. The resulting change in attitude is actually rather amusing… she turns from a demure, depressed convict into a “workout queen” a la Linda Hamilton in T2.

Skip ahead a few years and Elizabeth is released to a half-way house under the care of Travis Lehman (Tommy Lee Jones.) Travis is a hard nosed parole officer with a scarred past involving a DUI, which costs him his previous career and marriage.

Of course Elizabeth’s one purpose in life at this point is to track down her husband and get her son back. To do this she has to break parole (along with a few other laws) and its at this point that the chase begins. It feels like we’re watching a little bit of U.S. Marshalls, but Ashley is much better looking than Wesley Snipes of course.

I don’t feel I’ve actually given anything away in this review, in fact, I didn’t give away quite as much as the preview does. The movie is pure formula, but it’s a formula that works well and the performances by Ashley and Tommy Lee were both very well done. The film would work just as well on home video as it would on the big screen, thus the 3 star rating instead of a 4.

Posted by John | Filed Under 3 Stars, Action, Ashley Judd, Bruce Greenwood, DVD, R, Spencer Treat Clark, Tommy Lee Jones