Review: Just Mercy

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

If Destin Daniel Cretton's latest film, "Just Mercy," feels familiar to you, it's likely because of two reasons - that it incorporates courtroom cliches from decades of Hollywood dramas, but also because the story it tells relays to its audience an indisputable fact: the American justice system is far from just.

But despite its overly familiar setup - the prison and courtroom scenes feel almost exactly like the hundreds of prison and courtroom scenes we've seen in movies through the ages - "Just Mercy" manages to work due to the solid performances of its two leading characters - Michael B. Jordan as Bryan Stephenson, a fresh-out-of-school lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama and Jaime Foxx as Walter McMillian, an innocent man wrongly accused in the fatal shooting of a young white woman in the late 1980s.

It also helps that the film doesn't try too hard to make white audience members feel comfortable. Yes, Brie Larson is on board as Eva Ansley, Stephenson's right-hand woman in his crusade to represent death row inmates who couldn't afford legal counsel, and Tim Blake Nelson plays a prisoner who has an about-face late in the film after helping to put the innocent McMillian on death row in exchange for a softer punishment.

But otherwise, the film pulls no punches in depicting Alabama's criminal justice system as one operated by white bigots who treat black men as expendable fall-guys to close cases in which the actual perpetrators haven't been caught. There's a scene late in the film in which a district attorney is pretty much forced to agree that McMillian has taken the fall for someone else's actions, but the film still depicts the state's criminal justice system as the center for mass incarceration and unfair sentencing that it remains today.

McMillian's case isn't the only one taken on by Stephenson and Ansley - they also attempt to save a Vietnam veteran, whose actions led to a woman's death, from the electric chair and another man (portrayed by O'Shea Jackson Jr.) whom we learn was released after 30 years. He, like McMillian, was innocent.

The story is set in Monroeville, where Stephenson is told by multiple people upon entering town was the setting for Harper Lee's iconic "To Kill a Mockingbird." Stephenson is told by the inadequate DA and obviously racist sheriff that just because they incarcerate black men at prodigious rates - often without much evidence - it doesn't make them a racist town. The town associates itself with that novel, which is about justice above most other things, whereas Stephenson is the actual Atticus Finch of this story.

"Just Mercy" may traffic somewhat in Hollywood cliches in its presentation, but its story is an important one, and the filmmakers do a decent job of translating it to the screen. Jordan continues to prove that he's solid leading man material and Foxx gives his best performance in a while as the wronged McMillian. The film has been released in the heart of awards seasons for obvious reasons, but it also draws attention to the great inadequacies of America's criminal justice system. And that's a good thing.