Double Jeopardy

The 90s was a prime era for thrillers. You had the high concept, critically adored fare like Silence of the Lambs, the poorly received like Kiss the Girls, and the decent but largely forgettable like The Bone Collector. Double Jeopardy falls mostly into that last category. The movie is very journeyman in its construction, average in its story, and while it gets its thrillers in with tried and true 90s technique, there is something empty and formulaic about it. On top of that, the internal logic of the story doesn’t always make sense. This is typically done to create a tone or emotional beat in the story at the cost of a tightly written, internally consistent narrative.

There is this undeniable feeling when watching Double Jeopardy that the only reason it exists is because some writer or writers discovered the legal oddity at the center of the movie and sat down to have a big “what if…” writing session. This isn’t a condemnation in itself. The problem is that the movie doesn’t really expand beyond that initial idea in any meaningful way. There is this way that you can commit murder and not be found guilty, isn’t that clever!? And just in case that legal quirk isn’t a big enough part of the story, let’s have half the main cast be ex-lawyers, in new careers, so that no one misses out on the nuance of the situation moment to moment in the film.

The movie also tries to make something out of the wealth, power, and charisma of the sociopathic husband character, always living in a nice house and having a high paying job everywhere he goes, but given that after each jump he has to reinvent himself, with a new identity with no previous work history, it doesn’t make sense for him to always find himself in these positions. The first flight to San Francisco works, to some extent, in that he could be falling back on off-shored money that had been set aside while he was defrauding his failing Seattle based business, but after that… where does the money come from? They make a whole point of setting up how the life insurance money will go to the son, but it is placed in a trust. For a movie obsessed with the law, they ought to know that the whole point of a trust is that the money can’t be touched until the named recipient reaches a certain age, which makes this as a source of capital not work on three levels: the kid is too young to cash in, the kid keeps changing his name whenever they move so his identity doesn’t match the trust documents, and the amount of money in the trust (a specific value established by dialogue in the movie) simply isn’t enough to live a millionaire lifestyle in three different states over the span of six years.

The movie plays similarly fast and loose with certain character choices so as to keep the train of Libby, the protagonist’s, vengeance from coming off the rails. When Libby gets caught breaking into the school, why is she taken back to the halfway house instead of directly to jail, and by extension why is she escorted by only her parole officer and not a larger police contingent? Why does only one person in law enforcement seem to care that a convicted murderer has violated parole, skipped state, and is leaving a trail of wrecked cars and damaged property in her wake? Why does the villain bury Libby alive and leave her to die when he had every opportunity to just kill her quietly then and there, and then bury her body in the same spot, leaving no room for chance? It is heavily implied he has killed before, why is this time any different?

It is this kind of logical inconsistency that made me struggle. It would maybe have been less of an issue if those elements weren’t put so front and center in the story. The husband’s wealth becomes a focal point of the second act and the beginning of the third. For example, the buying and selling of specific, extremely expensive and rare art pieces is a major aspect of Libby’s hunt. Libby’s evasion of her parole officer is placed as the main cat and mouse game, far more than her and her intended murder target, which puts him and his subplot into the spotlight. In short, it gets hard to ignore the ways in which the story focuses more on what is expedient for the emotion and action of any given scene, rather than what makes for logical and grounded plot and characters.

That being said, those expedient emotional beats and action moments do land. They are not lacking in familiar cinematic language and story tropes. Like many action films of the same decade, Double Jeopardy is working from such a well understood and refined set of principles that even though it can border on formulaic in its construction, and its directing is best described as journeyman, the drama, the mystery, and even the action are all quite thrilling. It does what you’d expect of a film of that genre from that era. Nothing more, nothing less. Do I wish the characters were more fleshed out and interesting? Of course. Do I wish there was more to the cat and mouse games of both the parole officer, the wife, and her target? Absolutely. But not every movie can have a cast of characters as compelling and villainous as Silence of the Lambs, let alone the career defining performances of Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins to embody those characters. Double Jeopardy is a passably fair thriller that isn’t going to set anyone’s world on fire but for all but the strictest cinephiles and thriller aficionados, will deliver a few hours of forgettable entertainment despite its weak script.

Would Recommend: If any thriller is a good thriller.

Would Not Recommend: If Kubrick or Hitchcock levels of attention to detail are required for a film to feel “real.”