Double Jeopardy

Paramount bought the Weisberg and Cook pitch in 1995 for 260,000 dollars against 500,000. Harold Becker was attached first, then Luis Mandoki; Bruce Beresford only came aboard in summer 1997. The lead was just as unsettled. Jodie Foster left in December 1997 citing personal reasons, Helen Hunt and Michelle Pfeiffer passed, and the role went to Ashley Judd in April 1998. Tommy Lee Jones was meanwhile negotiating for a fee above the 10 million dollars he took for U.S. Marshals. Bruce Greenwood won the husband after screen tests alongside William Baldwin and Dylan Walsh. Shooting ran July to October 1998 and the film then sat almost a year. It spent three weeks at number one and took over 177 million dollars worldwide against a 40 million budget. Judd was named favourite suspense actress at the Blockbuster Entertainment awards, where Jones and Greenwood were nominated and lost. The double jeopardy rule the plot leans on does not work that way: a later killing rests on different facts and is a separate crime, and the reckoning happens in another state. A good fit if you can take a thriller bending the law, as long as it then stands honestly on the bend. Not for viewers who want the prison years opened out; the film hurries past to reach the pursuit.