‘Juror #2’ another intentionally muddy moral tale from Clint Eastwood

“Juror #2” — 2.5 stars

Remember when Clint Eastwood made what everyone assumed was his autumnal masterpiece, 1992’s “Unforgiven”? He was 62, and he was actually just getting started. Then, in 2008, he made what everyone assumed was REALLY his farewell to filmmaking, “Gran Torino.” He was 78, and he kept on going. Now, 11 films after that, comes Eastwood’s latest as a director, “Juror #2.” He’s 94. Want to bet he has a few more in him?

It’s not a great movie, but it’s pretty good, and it’s interesting in the way a lot of late-period Eastwood is, with odd thematic subcurrents banging up against functional and at times bland filmmaking. Like his generational colleague Francis Ford Coppola, but in a very different way, he seems to have thrown the rule book away — at his age, why not? — to tell the stories he wants the way he wants. For the past decade and a half, most of those stories have obsessed over heroism and its discontents.

“American Sniper,” “Sully,” “The 15:17 to Paris” and “Richard Jewell” all ponder the costs of being perceived as an American hero — what it does to a man’s reputation, sanity and soul. And “Juror #2,” a fictional movie and a lesser one, muddies the water still further, because its hero is both a family man and a murderer. (Spoilers, by necessity, ensue.)

Imagine a version of “12 Angry Men” where the juror played by Henry Fonda turns out to be the guy who did it. That’s the opening gambit of Jonathan Abrams’ script, in which Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is an average Joe who gets called to serve on a jury to deliberate whether a young roughneck (Gabriel Basso) killed his girlfriend (Francesca Eastwood, the director’s daughter) on a rainy nighttime road outside a roadhouse bar. Twist No. 1: As he hears the facts of the case, Justin realizes that he, too, was driving on that road that same dark and stormy night, and that the deer he thought he hit may not have been a deer.

“Juror #2” prompts us to sympathize with Justin’s plight only to yank our feelings and assumptions around. Hoult is good at playing handsome, decent young men with spines that turn out to be made of Jell-O, and the more we learn about Justin, the more unsure we are whether we’re meant to root for him. He has a doting wife (Zoey Deutch) at home in her third trimester of a high-risk pregnancy and an understanding Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor (Kiefer Sutherland) who’s conveniently an attorney and who warns Justin that the only way to ease his conscience without facing life in prison is to get his fellow jurors to find the accused not guilty.

Thus the movie mostly takes place in two arenas, the courtroom and the jury room. In the former, a fire-breathing prosecutor (Toni Collette) sees convicting the roughneck as her fastest ticket to getting elected district attorney, while the defense attorney (Chris Messina) pleads the innocence of a client who, for once, he believes didn’t do it. Eastwood uses flashbacks to the night in question to portray the couple as a pair of trashy sleazeballs, while Justin and his wife are never less than middle-class attractive, but then “Juror #2” starts mixing its signals, class and otherwise. (Unfortunately, the movie may be read by some as an apologia for domestic abusers, but “not all men” doesn’t really seem high on Eastwood’s agenda here.)

In the jury room, Justin takes on the classic Fonda role of trying to convince the others to vote not guilty, only with the added moral murkiness of trying to salve his own guilt. The jurors are a demographically mixed bunch with a few wild cards, including Marcus (Cedric Yarbrough), a no-nonsense man who’s sure the accused did it but also thinks Justin is up to something, and Harold (J.K. Simmons), a retired Chicago detective who decides to do some sleuthing on his own. There’s more than a bit of Hitchcock to “Juror #2” — it might as well be called “The Right Man” — or there would be if its maker were interested in making a conventional suspense thriller.

He’s not. In fact — and, again, this is typical of Eastwood’s late work — “Juror #2” seems content to set up a complicated moral scenario and then simply sit back to watch it unfold. (The curiously abrupt ending confirms that resolving the plot isn’t high on the director’s agenda either.)

Eastwood was never much of a cinematic stylist to begin with, and this film in particular has the dull, proficient sheen of a TV movie. Still, “Juror #2” contains the lived wisdom of an artist turning from contemplating how society fails the people we choose to call heroes to wondering about the ways in which a man might simply fail himself.

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Rated PG-13 for some violent images and strong language. 113 minutes.