Double Jeopardy (film)
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| Double Jeopardy | |
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 Film poster |
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| Directed by | Bruce Beresford |
| Produced by | Leonard Goldberg |
| Written by | David Weisberg Douglas Cook |
| Starring | Tommy Lee Jones Ashley Judd Bruce Greenwood |
| Music by | Normand Corbeil |
| Cinematography | Peter James |
| Editing by | Mark Warner |
| Distributed by | Paramount |
| Release date(s) | September 24, 1999 |
| Running time | 105 min. |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $70 million |
| IMDb profile | |
Double Jeopardy is a thriller film made in 1999, directed by Bruce Beresford and starring Tommy Lee Jones and Ashley Judd, about a woman who is framed for the murder of her husband.
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[edit] Plot
Elizabeth 'Libby' Parsons (Judd) is convicted of murdering her husband and sent to prison, though she has never done the act. She holds the belief, subsequently proven correct, that her husband Nick Parsons (Bruce Greenwood) is still alive and staged his own death for the purpose of falsely convicting her of murder and to evade an ongoing scandal revolving around him. She serves eight years in prison before being paroled, and emerges bent on finding her husband and son so as to take her revenge on the former and rescue the latter.
Libby encounters and recognizes Nick in an antique auction presided over by him. Eventually, with the help of an officer who is originally pursuing her, Elizabeth accomplished the mission and slew Nick.
[edit] Reception
The film received mostly negative reviews. It is rated 26% on Rotten Tomatoes as its "consensus" states "A talented cast fails to save this unremarkable thriller."[1] Roger Ebert gives the film two and half stars out of four, indicating a lukewarm reception.[2]
Nonetheless, some critics react to this film with positive reviews, such as Mick LaSalle from San Francisco Chronicle, writing that the film is a "well-acted diversion, directed by Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy) with an intelligent grasp of the moment-to-moment emotion".[3] For her performance in Double Jeopardy, Ashley Judd won the 2000 Favorite Actress of Blockbuster Entertainment Award.[4]
[edit] Box office
The gross domestic box office is 116,741,558 USD while foreign total revenue is 61.1 million USD.[5]
[edit] Disparity with the actual legal theory of double jeopardy
A major criticism of the movie was that the writers misrepresented the legal doctrine of double jeopardy, a constitutional right in the United States granted by the Fifth Amendment to the US constitution throughout the movie. In the movie, a fellow prison inmate advises Libby she could kill her husband in the middle of Times Square and the police would be powerless to do anything about it because of double jeopardy, because she had already been convicted once for his murder and served time. Both Libby and Lehman (Jones) repeat this theory later in the movie in order to frighten Nick in the climactic confrontation scene.
-it should be explained why this is not the case.
[edit] Cast
- Tommy Lee Jones - Travis Lehman
- Ashley Judd - Elizabeth "Libby" Parsons
- Bruce Greenwood - Nicholas "Nick" Parsons / Jonathan Devereaux
- Benjamin Weir - Matty Parsons age 4
- Jay Brazeau - Bobby Long
- John MacLaren - Rudy
- Ed Evanko - Warre
- Annabeth Gish - Angela "Angie" Green
[edit] References
- ^ Double Jeopardy. Rotten Tomatoes.
- ^ Ebert, Roger. Double Jeopardy. Sep. 24. 1999.
- ^ LaSalle, Mick. Criminally Good. San Francisco Chronicle. September 24, 1999
- ^ Awards for Double Jeopardy. IMDB.
- ^ Double Jeopardy. Box Office Mojo.
