The Judd family is talented, but Ashley Judd absolutely blows her family out the window (not physically, that would be tough).

Her acting and her beauty help make “Double Jeopardy” one of the best movies to kick off the fall season.

Libby Parsons (Judd) is living a great life. Her husband, Nick (Bruce Greenwood), is wonderfully charming, and her son is a perfect angel. Little does Libby know that Nick is about to go down financially and take his whole family with him.

So, Nick has a plan to fake his death and frame his wife for the murder.

He knows that the $2 million Libby will get from the insurance policy will establish a trust fund for their son. And since Nick is already sleeping with the kid’s nanny and family friend (Annabeth Gish), the three of them can live happily ever after while Libby rots in jail.

What a great husband.

So the plan goes down and works perfectly. After the nanny and Libby’s son visit Libby in jail a couple of times, the two of them disappear.

When Libby finds out where they have gone, she calls them from prison. While she is talking to her son on the phone, Nick walks in the door and the kid yells “Daddy!”

Needless to say, Libby is pissed.

When a few of her prisonmates find out what the situation is, they inform Libby of something called double jeopardy — a part of the fifth amendment that doesn’t allow a person to be convicted of the same crime twice.

Which means if Libby would walk up to Nick in Times Square in broad daylight and blow his brains all over the MTV building, nobody could touch her.

Libby has a new mission to get out of prison, find her son and maybe hurt Nick a little bit in the process.

This is where the movie jumps ahead a little.

Six years later, Libby is paroled. Her parole officer is Travis Lehman (Tommy Lee Jones), a bitter man whose wife and kid left him after a drunk driving accident.

A few days into her parole, Libby breaks it and continues her mission. But things are not as easy as she expected, as technology is six years ahead of her knowledge.

A couple of action scenes with her running from Lehman through different cities add more excitement to a time when you’re already rooting for Libby.

She snoops around long enough to track down some major clues leading to Nick and her son.

The great thing about this movie, besides a quality nudity scene with Judd, is that even though she breaks the law on her way to do something very immoral, there is something inside you that just says, “Kill the bastard.”

Judd’s ability to play both a sweet lady and a tough woman and put them into the same character is superb.

Her bitterness while in jail and when she gets out is so good it’s almost funny.

There is one scene in particular, wherein a guy is hitting on her in the library, and she very nonchalantly tells him that she chopped up her husband. (She was lying, of course, but how else is she supposed to explain her parole officer?)

Jones, though tabbed as the lead role, wasn’t really featured as much as you would think in the movie. But he does a great job of playing the hard-nosed guy with a hidden soft side who ends up being very helpful in the end.

The other actors in the film were barely in it enough to do anything spectacular, except Greenwood, who plays a great phony used car salesman.

One thing that isn’t quite touched on enough is that Libby was in prison for six years. The film doesn’t really show this time lapse, except through the fact that Libby’s hair has grown three inches.

For anyone going to this movie hoping to see a tribute to Alex Trebek, sorry. Ashley Judd is hotter, anyway.

FOUR STARS

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Kyle Moss is a sophomore in journalism and mass communication from Urbandale.