Review: Just Mercy

In 1987, an African-American man named Walter McMillan (Jamie Foxx) got arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of the murder of an 18 year-old white girl. He’s been on Death Row for several years when novice lawyer Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) offers to represent him and try to get a new trial. Stevenson acquires the aid of an anti-Capital Punishment activist named Eva Ansley (Brie Larson) and they go to work on what seems to have been a truly wrongful conviction involving corruption, prejudice, and incompetence from several levels of the so-called justice system. A mannered Tim Blake Nelson plays an inmate and important part of the case.

 

I was looking forward to this 2019 courtroom/true crime flick from director Destin Daniel Cretton and co-writer & Andrew Lanham (Cretton’s “The Last Castle” with Woody Harrelson and Brie Larson). I really liked Cretton’s “Short Term 12” (also with Brie Larson), and I love both courtroom movies and true crime stories. I will say though, that wrongful convictions don’t happen quite as often as podcasters and social justice groups seem to think (Let’s just say I think the right person was convicted for the murder of Hae Min Lee, to give one infamous example). It sure as shit does happen though, the justice system in America seems deeply flawed. It makes you incredibly angry to see it sometimes being the antithesis of what it’s supposed to be: the justice system. Cretton’s film does a good job early on of showing that there’s a lot of these death row cases with African-American inmates, likely a number of them railroaded by a corrupt and/or lazy judicial system. Based on the book by the real-life Bryan Stevenson, the difference to the story told in this film is that both the inmate and his lawyer are African-American, and therefore both men face a lot of the same prejudice. Unfortunately, despite almost universally fine performances there wasn’t enough difference to keep me interested in this pedestrian, utterly predictable film. It’s like I always say, unless it’s a documentary, just because a story is true that does not mean it is a story that needs to be told in cinematic terms.

 

Michael B. Jordan is the best thing here, immediately sympathetic and aside from being a touch old, well-cast. He’s terrific. Jamie Foxx shows himself to be a damn fine character actor here playing an incarcerated man seemingly a heck of a lot easier to sympathise with than ‘Tookie’ Williams from “Redemption” was. Oscar-winner Brie Larson is perfectly fine casting too, if completely underused. I just plain like her on screen, here she reminds me of a mixture of Jane Fonda and a young-ish Sally Field (circa “Norma Rae”). The problem is one of lack of screen time and lack of character depth. To be honest, it’s lacking with all of the characters here though. Combined with the familiarity, it just didn’t draw me into the story. I also wasn’t impressed by the overly busy, unconvincing scenery-chewing of a twitchy Tim Blake Nelson as a shifty inmate. It seemed more of an acting exercise than a characterisation and was a bit hard to take in a film that otherwise seemed fairly believable if nothing else.

 

All the good acting in the world couldn’t make me care about this overly familiar, dramatically inert true crime courtroom drama. It should’ve made me angry and outraged in the way that many true crime documentaries do for instance. Instead I was mostly clock-watching. Obviously well-intentioned, well made in some respects, but been there and done that time and time again. The predictable story is unworthy of the three solid central performances. It could’ve been a midday TV-movie (or better, a documentary whereby the issues of familiarity and cliché won’t be a negative). What a letdown!

 

Rating: C