"Just Mercy" might have been just another inspirational true story of the kind the American cinema seems very fond of and which they usually treat with much larger dollops of sentimentality than necessary but thanks to director Destin Daniel Cretton's expert handling of the material, a fine script and first-rate performances from Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx this is much more gripping, moving and intelligent than it could have been. It's the story of young African-American lawyer Bryan Stevenson and his fight to free wrongly convicted death-row prisoner Walter McMillan; Jordan is Stevenson and Foxx is McMillan. Of course, that's just the up close and personal element; what it's really about is America's Systemic Racism and although it's set thirty odd years ago the tragedy is it could have been made yesterday.
It's also a thriller, a kind of companion piece to "In the Heat of the Night" but without the grandstanding, Oscar-bait, crowd-pleasing elements and instead of a scenery-chewing Rod Steiger we have a much more nuanced Ralf Spall as a small town Southern lawyer. In fact, all the performances are first-rate with everyone underplaying superbly, (there's an Oscar-worthy turn from Tim Blake Nelson as a key witness), but the casting is just one of the film's many strengths. Cretton and Andrew Lanham's screenplay is humorous as well as honest while Cretton directs in that straightforward, classical style that Clint Eastwood has honed to perfection. Indeed Eastwood could easily have made this and if he had we would be hailing it as one of his finest films. Cretton has every reason to be proud.
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