Review: Just Mercy

Just Mercy (12A)

USA 2019  137 mins  Dir: Destin Daniel Cretton Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx, Brie Larson, Tim Blake Nelson, Rafe Spall, O’Shea Jackson Jr.

A black man jailed for a crime he clearly did not commit. A crusading, shiny-suited big city lawyer determined to get him off death row. A racist deep south community where local cops assert that you can tell whether someone’s guilty just by looking at them. You’ve seen this movie dozens of times already, right?

Destin Daniel Cretton’s solid, workmanlike, true-life courtroom drama certainly delivers everything you might expect from a prestige awards season miscarriage of justice flick: a virtuous, indefatigable hero; sneering, bigoted villains; and a brace of fine performances from its leads, with plenty of rousing speechifying. As is traditional, it’s also rather too long.

Just Mercy opens in the mid-’80s with the mob-handed arrest of perplexed Alabama wood pulp worker Walter ‘Johnny D’ McMillan (Jordan). Swiftly convicted by an all-white jury of the long-unsolved murder of a white woman, he languishes on Death Row. This is where he’s found six years later by idealistic Harvard graduate lawyer Bryan Stevenson (Foxx), who’s defied his mother’s qualms to head south and found the Equal Justice Initiative. Its mission is to provide gratis legal representation to condemned prisoners who are, needless to say, overwhelmingly poor and black. He’s suitably appalled to learn that McMillan was convicted on the evidence of a sole witness: a white career criminal named Ralph Myers (Nelson) who span a preposterous cock and bull story. What’s more, there are dozens of other witnesses able to testify that McMillan was across town at a fish fry when the crime was committed. Unfortunately, each and every one of them is black.

From this point, the film proceeds pretty much as you might expect, with all the anticipated victories and setbacks. All your favourite two-dimensional stock characters are here too, including the sinister good ol’ boy sheriff and his DA sidekick (Spall), neither of whom take kindly to a silvery-tongued black outsider suggesting that they are partly responsible for a miscarriage of justice of almost comical ineptitude. The lead performances are strong, although Jamie Foxx is obliged to act from within a nobility straitjacket as justly revered social justice activist Bryan Stevenson, who stoically endures multiple humiliations. This permits Michael B. Jordan to steal it from under his nose as the rather more nuanced and complex condemned man.

There are some clever directorial flourishes – a slick montage underlines the fact that black convicts can expect little in the way of competent legal representation, for example – but it all feels rather bloodless as it proceeds towards the predictable, applause-demanding climax. Except, that is, for the devastatingly raw performance by Rob (The Last Black Man in San Francisco) Morgan in a supporting role as stuttering, PTSD-afflicted ‘nam veteran and fellow Death Row inmate Herbert Richardson, who never denies his guilt and accepts his fate with heartbreaking equanimity despite Stevenson’s best efforts on his behalf. Even here, however, Cretton pulls his punches by tastefully cutting away.