Double Jeopardy (15) General Release
As its oh-so-generic title implies, Double Jeopardy is one of those thrillers that reassembles bits from countless other movies you've seen, presumably in the hope that you've forgotten them already. The resulting mish-mash is then reheated too quickly and served too fast. The film's surprisingly respectable performance at the US box office suggests that such cynical, unimaginative tricks work as well as ever, although it may also have something to do with the rising reputation of its star, Ashley Judd, who is the only good thing happening here.
Judd plays a well-to-do housewife, happily married to apparently successful businessman Bruce Greenwood. The couple have an adorably cute son, lots of lovely friends and a lifestyle of the rich and famous. Things are bound to go wrong, of course, and they do when Judd wakes up aboard the family yacht in the middle of the night to find her husband gone and the deck covered in blood.
In the interests of preserving what little tension there is to be found in Double Jeopardy, readers will be spared the rather predictable twist which ensues, except to say that it does involve Tommy Lee Jones as a tough-but-kind probation officer, not a million miles removed from the tough-but-kind marshal he played in The Fugitive, and that there's a Fugitive-style chase across America. Ho hum . . . (the movie's distributors have no such qualms about giving things away - the trailer for Double Jeopardy currently running in cinemas is a classic example of the current, deplorable trend towards leaving nothing to the imagination).
Director Bruce Beresford has tended to specialise in recent years in movies with women as the central characters, and not surprisingly concentrates on his heroine's transition from pampered socialite to lean, mean vengeance machine, which Judd carries very well. Unfortunately, Beresford has never shown any great aptitude for thrillers, and he seems uninterested in making the dynamics of this particular plot work. As a result, Double Jeopardy never develops much tension, the so-called revelations are not particularly surprising and the film fizzles out like a damp squib towards its finale in New Orleans, while Jones's only function seems to be to provide a familiar name above the title.
