Movie titles aren’t always supposed to be taken literally, but when the moniker of a particular film also happens to serve as the basis for the entire plot, then maybe an ironclad degree of accuracy would have been expected.
Two-time Academy Award nominee Bruce Beresford’s crime thriller Double Jeopardy was never intended to be a hard-hitting drama designed to appeal to critics, which is just as well when it wound up with an unremarkable Rotten Tomatoes score of just 27%, but the box office hit was lambasted for failing to understand its own terminology.
Putting the oversights to one side for a moment, Double Jeopardy has found itself in the midst of an unexpected Netflix renaissance per FlixPatrol, having soared onto the platform’s most-watched list by securing Top 10 placings in eight countries this weekend.
Ashley Judd’s Libby Parsons finds herself imprisoned for the murder of her husband, but after being released on parole, she sets out to unravel the mystery that tore her life apart when she discovers her spouse faked his own death and made her out to be the culprit.
To do this, she operates under the assumption that she can exact revenge by killing him without consequences on the basis of the titular Fifth Amendment clause. Of course, you can’t legally go ahead and murder someone with impunity just because you were wrongfully convicted of a crime, which is a pretty glaring flaw in the narrative masterplan.
Not that it really matters, when Double Jeopardy doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a glossy Hollywood genre film that relies on a top-notch cast giving solid performances to paper over the cracks in the storytelling. Audiences didn’t mind, either, with the movie going on to earn $177 million from theaters on a $70 million budget, even if the legal eagles were left a little dismayed by the premise.