By Geno McGahee
In 1992, Pauly Shore would have the hit ENCINO MAN and follow up with the equally popular SON IN LAW in 1993. He would have less success with IN THE ARMY NOW in 1994 and would totally crash and burn with the box office failure JURY DUTY. I hadn’t seen JURY DUTY since it was first released and it is pretty obvious why it failed and it’s not just because it was poorly written and acted.
In previous movies, Shore was focused on as a very different sort of person but his heart was in the right place. He was likable. In JURY DUTY, that is all gone. He is a self-serving unfunny character that is impossible to support. I’m not sure what the filmmakers were going for. I guess they thought that Shore doing silly voices and expressions were enough to make it a hit and they were way off. This was rough to get through.
Tommy (Shore) is a guy that can’t keep a job and doesn’t seem to mind. He is sleeping in the afternoon when his mother wakes him up and celebrates that he got jury duty. She informs him that a big trial would pay him five dollars a day and put him up in a nice hotel. That appeals to Tommy and he begins disqualifying himself from every trial in hopes to get on the biggest trial available. He wants to get on the jury of the serial killer and drag it on as much as possible so he can get some easy living.
I usually really like Shore, but he was so freaking annoying in this thing. From the opening scene, it kept getting worse. On the bus, on the way to the courtroom, he grabbed the microphone and began doing this odd impression of a celebrity tour guide. You’d think the director would have jumped in here and said “THAT’S NOT FUNNY SHORE,” but it went on for far too long. It continues when he is getting kicked out of various trials. It was very unfunny. I don’t get why they went this direction and nobody said anything. Perhaps Shore was too big of a star at the time to even challenge.
The trial is on and the cast is very good with Monica (Tia Carrere), Harry (Brian Doyle-Murray), Beasley (Richard Riehle) and Rose (Billie Bird) making up some of the jury. There were some things here that should have been made for a good film, but it cannot overcome Shore. The whole film is Tommy trying to drag the trial on and help himself and it doesn’t work. I kept watching, hoping that it would come together, but it never happened.
There are a couple laughs here but there is no charm. Had the filmmakers just gone with what works…Shore playing the social misfit with a big heart. Had he been thrown into a jury with that sort of character, there would have been room for laughs and he’d be easy to support, but this is a mean-spirited character that Shore plays from time to time and it has never worked.
JURY DUTY failed because it’s not good. There were certainly the ingredients for a good film, but the filmmakers didn’t learn anything from the success of ENCINO MAN and SON IN LAW. They went in a different direction and paid for it.
