A SUMMONS TO AVOID

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF LOUSY movies: those made by morons and those made in the firm belief that we are the morons. The former are forgivable--poor dears, they don't know any better. The latter, of which The Juror is a particularly egregious example, are infuriating. They leave you feeling you've been patronized and bilked by people nursing entirely unearned superiority complexes.

The rapidly escalating implausibility of this film begins mildly enough, when it asks us to believe that Annie Laird (Demi Moore), a struggling artist and devoted single mom, would cheerfully set aside her preoccupations to volunteer for jury duty. Anyone else in her circumstances would be out getting a doctor's note, but no, she's actually eager to take a few weeks off to help decide the fate of a Mafia boss accused of conspiring to commit murder.

Soon she and her son are being stalked by the Teacher (Alec Baldwin), a sort of New Age hit man. She will, he insists, convince her panel to free the capo, or she and the boy will be killed. The Teacher wears his psychopathy on his sleeve as plainly as Annie wears her vulnerability, and he is also one windy dude. For a while you think maybe his plan is to bore her into submission to his evil will. ("All right. All right. I'll do anything. Just shut up about the tao.")

Clearly, The Juror isn't interested in placing its heroine in the kind of jeopardy--a matter of silences, shadows, and nasty surprises--that blows away disbelief. It wants her to find not only grace under pressure but also empowerment in a world where all the males she meets are either brutes or wimps. Well, all right, you say--a feminist thriller. It's been done (by, among others, Ted Tally, the screenwriter of The Juror, who also wrote The Silence of the Lambs), but you still have to play by thriller rules. When, for example, Annie boldly sashays up to the Mafia capo to have a little chat, we need to understand how she knew he would be in this particular and peculiar place--a cemetery, not some social club in Little Italy--at just this moment. Or when the Teacher needs to car bomb the mobster's limousine, we need to have some hint of how he gained access to it when the last we knew they were miles apart. For that matter, it would be nice if the director, Brian Gibson, who has also done better things (What's Love Got to Do with It), kept his geography straight. Sometimes the courthouse to which Annie reports seems to be in a small town, sometimes in a big city.

You can't really act in a movie like this; you can only look swell and play attitudes, which everybody here does. The basic trouble with The Juror is that like a lot of movies these days, it is narratively arrogant. Its creators either think they're so smart they can distract us from whopping elisions in their story line--there's a lot of murky stylishness in the film's look--or believe we're so stupid that we won't notice them. But as those trailers about the movie theater's sound system keep reminding us, "The Audience is Listening." Watching too. And from time to time wondering what possesses them to go on spending $7.50 a pop on this kind of numbing drivel.

--By Richard Schickel