DOUBLE JEOPARDY

Directed by Bruce Beresford. Starring Ashley Judd, Tommy Lee Jones, Bruce Greenwood

THERE ARE a dozen or so films every year that somehow manage to signal their awfulness in advance merely by virtue of the title, and Double Jeopardy – misleadingly billed as a ‘suspense thriller’ – lives entirely down to expectation.

By the time you read the plot summary – a woman is falsely framed for her husband’s murder – you feel as if you’ve already seen the film, and all that’s left is to see how many ridiculous twists and turns they can manage to sneak in.

Even Ashley Judd never had a hope of saving this one, which speaks volumes for the depths of its dreadfulness. Double Jeopardy does absolutely nothing to enhance her repuation. In fairness, the bone-stupid script stacks the odds against her from the outset: she plays a happy housewife blissfully married to handsome hotshot Nick Parsons (Greenwood) whose idyll is rudely shattered when, in the course of a cruise on the couple’s luxury yacht, she wakes up in the middle of the night to find blood all over the place and her husband apparently vanished.

The only positive spin-off from this is that the audience are spared the sight of Greenwood for the next hour or so – by Christ, have I ever seen anyone as smug and repellent as this? – while Judd embarks on a lengthy prison stint, cravenly devoid of cat-fights or red-hot lesbian frolics, before emerging with vengeance on her mind and doing her level-best to enliven the film’s final stretches.

Tommy Lee Jones, a craggily appealing if eternally predictable presence, shows up as Judd’s parole officer and plods contentedly through the motions in his usual fashion, as Double Jeopardy careers towards a crushingly uninspired payoff.

Even the film’s potential malevolence is neutralised by a sickeningly sentimental subplot concerning Judd’s quest to re-unite with her cute lickle baby son – and the pivotal twists and turns are so contrived, so preposterous and yet effortlessly predictable, that you don’t know whether to yawn, cry, laugh like a lunatic, scream at the screen or just sidle towards the exits. I took the latter option.

Not recommended.