I had sort of hoped that this would be yet another attempt to revitalize a The Fugitive spinoff, but after U.S. Marshals, in which Tommy Lee Jones’s best shot is when he’s dressed as a giant chicken, I guess that was not to be…

Here we have a happy, well-to-do married couple, Libby and Nick Parsons (Ashley Judd and Bruce Greenwood, in that order), safely sequestered away in a big house on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. Despite some recent minor financial reverses, Nick is going to buy Libby the sailboat she’s always wanted. But when they take it out for an overnight test spin, bad things happen; Libby wakes up to find herself covered with blood, Nick has disappeared — in the middle of the ocean — and an incriminating knife, which she happens to pick up just as the Coast Guard arrives, lying on deck. A jury, reasonably supposing that Libby has done away with Nick for the sake of a two-million-dollar insurance payout, condemns her to prison, while her friend Angela (Annabeth Gish) promises to take care of her four-year-old son Matty (Benjamin Weir). But then Angela and the boy disappear, and Libby finds reason to believe that hubby Nick is still alive and kicking.

Six years later, out on parole and relegated to a halfway house administered by burned out law professor Travis Lehman (Tommy Lee Jones), Libby, who has been told that if you are condemned for a murder that you didn’t commit you can actually commit it after serving your time — the “Double Jeopardy” of the title — sets out to violate all the conditions of her parole and track down her son Matty and husband Nick. The high points of the journey include a beach chase on Whidbey Island, a demolition derby on a ferry in Puget Sound, another one in front of an art gallery in Boulder, Colorado, and a premature burial in a used coffin in a crypt in New Orleans, all with a disgruntled Lehman — Tommy Lee Jones does digruntlement very well — hot on her tail, essentially reprising his role as Sam Gerard. We all know that eventually she will find husband Nick, convince Lehman of her innocence, and regain her son, a la Harrison Ford, but the journey to this point is quite interesting.

Jones and Judd turn in creditable performances, but I particularly liked Greenwood’s Nick Parsons, a man who, to paraphrase Bellocq from Raiders of the Lost Ark, “…is going to give amorality a bad name.” The genuinely frightening side of this is that Parsons seemed less like a thoroughgoing sociopath than like a not atypical member of today’s ubiquitous financial-managerial class.

All in all, a fun movie, though probably not a terribly memorable one (in the canon of Tommy Lee Jones masterpieces, it’ll probably be ranked more or less the same as Volcano).