Double Jeopardy film review

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DOUBLE JEOPARDY

There's a rather handy little clause in law, known as double jeopardy, which states that "a person cannot be convicted twice for the same crime based on the same conduct".

So someone who has been acquitted of murder cannot be tried a second time for that same offence. This legal safeguard is the crux of Bruce Beresford's disappointingly routine thriller, the story of a woman battling against injustice to clear her good name.

Ashley Judd plays wealthy housewife and mom Libby Parsons, who finds herself in a spot of bother when her oily husband Nick (Bruce Greenwood) fakes his own death and plants evidence to suggest that she bumped him off as part of an elaborate insurance scam.

Sent to prison for seven years, Libby vows revenge, breaking her conditions of parole to track down her scheming other half, with grizzled parole officer Travis Lehman (Tommy Lee Jones) in hot pursuit.

As premises go, Double Jeopardy sounds like pretty exciting and thought-provoking stuff. Unfortunately, screenwriters David Weisberg and Douglas Cook have no time for intelligent discussion or logical plot development, preferring a brainless chase a la The Fugitive, with Judd taking the Harrison Ford role as the wrongly convicted escapee.

En route to the showdown between the spouses, the film contrives to have Judd handcuffed to a car sinking in the ocean, and trapped inside a coffin with a rotting corpse.

Libby certainly goes out of her way to get herself killed, or at least badly injured. Judd's performance is far better than the film deserves - she makes Libby seem almost three-dimensional - but Lee Jones is on auto-pilot throughout. Guilty of mediocrity.