Double Jeopardy (DVD 2001)

Jones and Judd are powerful antagonists in this film of "women's empowerment". Judd, as "Libby Parsons", awakes to find a trail of blood leading from bed to brine and is convicted of her husband's murder. The evidence is hard to refute. The two were alone on a yacht off Seattle and the Coast Guard arrives while she stands with a bloody knife in her grasp. At sentencing, Judd assigns her son Matthew to family friend, Annabeth Gish. Gish, however, has an even deeper interest - she's having an affair with Judd's husband Nick [Bruce Greenwood]. Oh, yes. He's still alive after all!
Judd, twigging to Nick's survival, now sets herself a quest. Advised that she can't be tried twice for the same crime - no "double jeopardy" - she becomes a model prisoner. Eager for parole [nobody keeps a woman incarcerated for husband-murder any more], she exercises with stern intent. She trains in ways to make an Olympics try-out blush from inadequacy. Jogging in the rain [in Gig Harbour?], building up her timing, coordination and . . . The remainder of the film allows Judd to reveal just what she might have picked up in her "Washington State Correctional" rehabilitation programme. She begins to apply them almost as soon as she's placed in a parolee halfway house run by Tommy Lee Jones.

Jones, at his best irascible self, lays down the rules for behaviour - otherwise it's "back inside". Judd, burning with desire to retrieve her son, flaunts his regimen immediately and the chase is on! Judd dodges and twists in one breath-catching scene after another until the pair reaches New Orleans. What a backdrop for chase scenes! Wrought-iron grillwork! Jazz concerts for funerals! Cemeteries of vast stretches of above-ground tombs for capering around and hiding behind or in! Judd pursues her son with intense dedication, especially after what she learned of Gish's fate in trusting Greenwood. The result is a captivating sequence in the cemetery involving both husband and son. Or does it? All that exercise at Gig Island proves useful as Judd sheds much of her feminine mystique to become a female Clint Eastwood. The final confrontation is rife with surprises.

That the law actually wouldn't let Judd off scot free for "killing" Greenwood twice is almost irrelevant. This film sparkles with the personalities of Judd and Jones. Both grace any film they make - together, the result is almost overwhelming. Jones' droll delivery in tense moments provides the perfect leit motif where needed. There's not much humour in this story, but Tommy Lee Jones can produce effects that overcome the sombre. If the improbabilities of plot are ignored and the viewer lets the personalities dominate, this is an enjoyable film.