DOUBLE JEOPARDY Send This Review to a Friend
Think of this misfire as triple jeopardy. The double jeopardy is the neat premise. A philandering husband pretends to be murdered and skips away with his son and mistress while his wife Libby is sent to prison for the supposed crime. When she gets out she has the perfect possibility. She can kill the louse without fear of prosecution because she's already been convicted of killing him and can't be tried for the same crime twice.
The third jeopardy is faced by the filmmakers, saddled with a screenplay filled with one improbability after another, and there's no way to escape the punishment of critical retribution for those gaffs. Ashley Judd gives an energetic, attractive performance as the wife done wrong and bent on revenge and retrieving her son, and Tommy Lee Jones adds strength as Travis, the skeptical, hard-bitten half-way house officer who finally comes to believe Libby is really innocent. Credit director Bruce Beresford with keeping the action scenes lively and soaking up the atmosphere of the various locales, including New Orleans.
But the laughably far-fetched screenplay by David Weisberg and Douglas S. Cook fritters away the premise. For starters, it's hard to believe that, given her grisly murder rap, Libby would have been let out of prison to a half-way house after only six years. Before the film is over Libby survives enough dangerous situations to kill a cat, and at the end, there is one of those utterly cliched struggling-for-survival scenes that one would think a filmmaker would be embarrassed to include.
When it's over, we're left with the empty feeling that "Double Jeopardy" is incurably absurd and the acting talent is completely wasted. An intriguing premise still needs an intriguing screenplay. A Paramount release.
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