Usually I watch family entertainers during the weekends while keeping the thrillers and action movies for the weekdays but this time around, I did the opposite. This Sunday I thought I would rather watch a good suspense thriller and so searched vigorously on the internet. But whatever suspense thriller of the recent times that I came across (that is, reading their synopsis), not one really exited me. It was then that I stumbled across "Double Jeopardy" starring Ashley Judd and Tommy Lee Jones and directed by Bruce Beresford. It is actually a revenge story of a wife played by Ashley judd. It's an old movie from 1999 and though it's not an out-of-the-world movie but it is surely good enough.
Judd playes the character of Libby Parsons who has got a happy family, with a loving husband (played by Bruce Greenwood) and a four year old son whom she dotes on. Then one day her husband and she set out into the lake on a sail boat that he had bought, to spend some romantic time together. After they made love, Ashley falls asleep as she had had some wine too. But upon waking up, she doesn't find her husband around, he was missing but there were blood marks on her night-gown, on the floor of the boat and a knife too. Later she is herself convicted for her husband's murder and is put in the jail, for she had picked up the knife with bare hands and so had left her finger-prints on them. She hands over her son to her sister and asks her to take care of him till she gets released. Unfortunately Judd's lawyer fails to get her released through bail and so she is forced to spend six years in the jail. Her sister does visit her once with Libby's son but after a few months, her friend as well as her son disappear and Libby gets restless on not finding any news about her son.
Then one day she succeeds in finding out the new address of her sister and just while taking to her son, she overhears her husband's voice in the background. Her husband Nick was actually having an affair with her young sister and he hadn't died, that was all part of a plan to earn the insurance money. Six years is a long time to spend in the jail but what keeps Libby going is her burning desire to find her son and also to take revenge from her ex-husband. In the jail, she had come across two other jail inmates whom she eventually becomes friends with, and one of them who used to be a lawyer at one point in time, tells her about a provision in the US law called "Double jeopardy". By Double Jeopardy, she meant since Libby had already been convicted for her husband's murder, she could now walk up to her very much alive husband and may kill him in broad daylight and yet she wouldn't be punished! Libby even succeeds in getting parole and sets out on her plan. However what stood on her way was her cynical parole officer played by Tommy Lee Jones. What then follows is a cat-and-mouse game.
As expected, both Ashley judd and Tommy Lee Jones put up strong performances and it was for them that the movie didn't seem that boring, even though it had nothing new to offer. It could have been a far better movie had it got some suspense. Sadly there is very little suspense in the movie and so one would be knowing about the outcome much before it was to happen.
