The Juror

The Juror is a 1996 American legal thriller film based on the 1995 novel by George Dawes Green. It was directed by Brian Gibson and stars Demi Moore as a single mother picked for jury duty for a mafia trial and Alec Baldwin as a mobster sent to intimidate her. The film received highly negative reviews and Moore won a joint Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress for both her performance in this film and in Striptease.

Plot
Annie Laird is a talented sculptor living in the suburbs of New York City with her son Oliver. Although she works a day job as a data entry clerk, Annie has a strong passion for her art and is determined to make a living from it. Her dreams come true just as she is chosen to be one of the jurors in a high-profile trial of mafia boss Louie Boffano, who is accused of ordering the murder of rival Salvatore Riggio and members of his family, including his father and his son, a young child. Annie's life is further complicated when Mark Cordell appears at her studio and buys three of her sculptures. He invites her to dinner and she is charmed by his attention. Little does she know that Mark is a hitman known as "The Teacher", Boffano's enforcer and the actual perpetrator of Riggio's murder, whose real name is Vincent. When Annie finds out the truth, she is horrified. Vince threatens her and her son's life unless she convinces the jury to acquit Boffano. Faced with this impossible situation, Annie finds herself in a desperate fight for survival.

When Oliver senses that she is in trouble, he informs her best friend, a doctor named Juliet, about it. She convinces her to quit jury duty by faking her son a sickness. However, when she tries to do so, the judge refuses to hear her without including the prosecution and the defense. When Vince and his partner Eddie find out about it, as a warning, Vince takes her for a drive and almost kills Oliver and murders the owner of the storage unit Vince was renting to scare her. During the trial, she was scared to take the stand, but despite her fears, she managed to convince the jury to acquit Boffano which makes Vince infatuated towards her. After the trial, Boffano questions whether Annie should disappear, seeing her as a loose end, but Vince and Eddie convince him otherwise. To keep Annie under his control by instilling fear, Vince goes after Juliet. After luring her in by pretending to be a lover named Paul, he reveals himself to be Annie's stalker and forces Juliet to overdose on drugs at gunpoint. Later, he boasts of her murder to Eddie. Unlike Vince, Eddie is sympathetic to Annie's situation, as he is a parent himself.

Annie is determined to keep her son safe, so she takes him to the small village of T'ui Cuch, Guatemala, to place him under the care of her ex-boyfriend Boone. She hopes that by hiding out there, Oliver will be safe from the danger that has engulfed their lives. The prosecutor, who has figured out that Annie was threatened by Vince by finding evidence of irregular money transfers to her bank account, wants her to turn state's witness so they can bring him to justice and prevent him from taking over the Boffano empire. Annie is scared of the consequences of testifying against Vince, but eventually decides that it's the right thing to do to ensure her son's safety. She contacts the prosecutor and agrees to testify, setting in motion a chain of events that will hopefully bring justice to those who have wronged her and her son.

Annie and the prosecutor gather evidence against Vince. She had done all the research and had a feeling she could get him to confess and incriminate himself. After much convincing, the prosecutor agrees to let Annie wear a wire in a scheduled meeting with Vince. On the day of the meeting, Annie removes the wire and gives it to Eddie, insinuating they were now a couple. She gets Mark to boast about his ambitions which include killing Boffano. Unbeknownst to anyone else, she had hidden a tape recorder on her body, which she later gives to Boffano in a meeting that Eddie set up for her.

Later, Eddie lures Vincent to a meeting with Boffano at the New Jersey Palisades, where he confronts Vince about his desire to usurp him, and prepares him for his execution. When he realizes that Annie was plotting to kill him, he detonates a bomb that he had smuggled in Boffano's limousine, and kills the other henchmen, then executes Boffano's son Joseph. Afterwards, he goes to Eddie's house, where he kills him for his betrayal, then calls Annie and declares his intention to kill Oliver in Guatemala.

Vincent then arrives in Guatemala City where he gets a ride from a local who he later kills, and sets off for Tu'i Cuch. When Annie reaches Guatemala City, she convinces the local police with Vince’s money to take her to the village by using one of their planes. In the village, he spots Oliver in the middle of a local festival, and chases after him to an abandoned Mayan temple, where he is ambushed by armed local men who had been organized by Annie. She then reveals herself and confronts Vince, where he declares that if she kills him, they would be "bonded forever". He takes out a pistol hidden in his ankle, but Annie shoots him dead before he could fire. Afterwards, a relieved Annie reunites with her son.

Production
Columbia Pictures acquired the film rights to the unpublished book for $1.5 million. They then paid Ted Tally over $1 million to write the screenplay.

Critical response
The Juror was a critical failure. It holds a 22% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 23 reviews, with an average rating of 4.5/10. The site's consensus states: "Self-serious despite its abundance of trite twists, The Juror is a drab thriller that audiences may hold in contempt." Moore won a joint Razzie Award for Worst Actress for both her performance in this film and in Striptease. She was also nominated for the same joint award at the 1996 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards but lost to Whoopi Goldberg for Theodore Rex, Eddie, and Bogus. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a grade of "B+" on a scale of A+ to F.

Box office
The film grossed $22.7 million in the United States and Canada and $63 million worldwide, against its $44 million budget.