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We are republishing this piece on the homepage in allegiance with a critical American movement that upholds Black voices. For a growing resource list with information on where you can donate, connect with activists, learn more about the protests, and find anti-racism reading,  click here . "Just Mercy" is currently streaming for free on Amazon, Google Play, and YouTube. #BlackLivesMatter.

“Just Mercy” has the misfortune of hitting theaters at the same time as “ Clemency ,” a more daring and better film set on a prison’s Death Row. Though the lead characters differ in intent— Michael B. Jordan ’s activist Bryan Stevenson is trying to get prisoners off the row while Alfre Woodard ’s warden Bernadine Williams oversees their executions—the two actors each have moments of stillness where they seem to physically vibrate from the internal trauma they’re suppressing. This is built into Woodard’s character intrinsically, but for Jordan, it feels more like an actor doing his best to rise above the paper-thin characterization he has been given. Stevenson is so noble and flawless that he’s a credible bore unless you focus on Jordan’s physicality. You look into his eyes and see him trying to play something the film’s cautious tone won’t allow: a sense of Black rage.

Since the days of '50s-era message pictures, the majority of films about African-American suffering have always been calibrated the way “Just Mercy” is, with an eye to not offending White viewers with anything remotely resembling Black anger. We can be beaten, raped, enslaved, shot for no reason by police, victimized by a justice system rigged to disfavor us or any other number of real-world things that can befall us, yet God help us if a character is pissed off about this. Instead, we get to be noble, to hold on to His unchanging hand while that tireless Black lady goes “hmmm-HMMMMM!” on the soundtrack to symbolize our suffering. There’s a lot of “hmmm-HMMMMM”-ing in this movie, so much so that I had to resist laughing. These clichés are overused to the point of madness. Between this, the equally lackluster “ Harriet ” and the abysmal “ The Best of Enemies ,” that poor woman’s lips must be damn tired from all that humming.

Movies like “Just Mercy” spoon-feed everything to the viewer in easily digestible chunks that assume you know nothing, or worse, don’t know any better. They believe that, to win the hearts and minds of racists, you can’t depict any complexity lest you ruin the “teachable moment” the film is supposed to be presenting. It’s unfortunate that these teachable moments are so often delivered in the exact same, tired manner, as if they were meant for people who are perpetually having to repeat the same grade. Making matters worse, the White perpetrators of injustice are so often one-note villains that they allow for plausible deniability by the viewer: “I can’t be racist because I’m nowhere near as bad as THAT guy!” Granted, this is a period piece true story and the film can’t bend its real-life people too deeply into dramatic license, but director and co-writer Destin Daniel Cretton applies a way-too-familiar formula to their personalities.

Despite my complaints, I have some admiration for how much “Just Mercy” is willing to interrogate. It’s a lot, and I feel some commendation is in order for bringing these issues up at all. Adapting Stevenson’s memoir, Cretton and his co-writer Andrew Lanham touch upon activists for Death Row prisoners, the value of White lives vs. Black lives, veterans whose PTSD is left unchecked, corrupt law officials, justice system imbalances and, in a subplot anchored by Tim Blake Nelson , the idea that poor people are victimized by law enforcement regardless of what color the impoverished person is.

I remember watching the “60 Minutes” profile re-created here, where Stevenson takes the case of Walter McMillian ( Jamie Foxx ) to the public. McMillian was on Death Row for a crime he swore he didn’t commit, the death of a young White woman. Despite having 17 witnesses vouching for his whereabouts at the time of the murder, an Alabama jury of 11 White men and one Black man convicted McMillian based on the testimony of an ex-con named Ralph Meyers (Nelson). Stevenson took his case to the CBS airwaves after his successful attempt to get McMillian’s case reopened ended with a judge named after Robert E. Lee discarding Myers’ admission that he’d lied under oath in the first trial. All of this is completely believable in reality, but here, both the corrupt Sheriff Tate ( Michael Harding ) and the district attorney are depicted as cartoon villains acting alone rather than in service to a far more racist and corrupt system. You have to wait until midway through the closing credits to discover that Tate was re-elected multiple times after his role in McMillian’s railroading was exposed.

I should mention that this case took place in Monroeville, Alabama, also known as the home of “ To Kill a Mockingbird ” author Harper Lee. I bring up Lee because her book, and its subsequent cinematic adaptation, are ground zero for all the aggravating clichés I mentioned above. So it’s no coincidence that “Just Mercy” plugs Michael B. Jordan into the Atticus Finch role. Like Gregory Peck in that immortal performance, Jordan has presence, idealism and righteousness on his side. What’s missing is the commanding sense of authority Peck brought to the part, which isn’t Jordan’s fault at all. Stevenson is a somewhat naïve Yankee from Delaware trying to navigate the ways of the Deep South; Finch was an Alabama native with a paternal glow.

As Stevenson’s co-worker Eva, Brie Larson reteams with her “ Short Term 12 ” director but is given little to do other than to be threatened once she re-opens McMillian’s case. Still, she milks a lot of character out of the simple act of smoking a cigarette. Foxx’s McMillian is written in a similarly flat manner, but he shines in his few scenes with fellow Death Row inmate Herbert Richardson ( Rob Morgan ). Richardson’s arc is the one truly successful element of “Just Mercy,” and Morgan’s excellent, heartbreaking performance is being unfairly overshadowed by Foxx’s this awards season. A Vietnam vet with severe PTSD, Richardson caused the death of a young girl when a bomb he planted on her porch exploded. Unlike McMillian, Richardson is guilty of the crime and believes he belongs on Death Row. He was unable to get help for his mental issues before he committed his crime, and the prosecutor withheld this information during the trial.

Morgan shades his small part with such beautiful, subtle gestures that he becomes the only character who feels fleshed out, complex and real. You feel not only his sense of guilt but the demons that infected his brain during combat. His last, horrific scene is so well acted that it still haunts me; it’s the only time the viewer is forced to be uncomfortably conflicted, to think about the complicated nature of injustice. I wish the rest of “Just Mercy” had that level of jarring complexity instead of relying on easy tropes to deliver its message.

"Just Mercy" is currently streaming for free on Amazon, Google Play, and YouTube.

Odie Henderson

Odie "Odienator" Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire  here .

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Film credits.

Just Mercy (2019)

Rated PG-13 for thematic content including some racial epithets.

136 minutes

Michael B. Jordan as Bryan Stevenson

Jamie Foxx as Walter McMillian

Brie Larson as Eva Ansley

O'Shea Jackson Jr. as Anthony Ray Hinton

Rafe Spall as Tommy Champan

Rob Morgan as Herbert Richardson

Tim Blake Nelson as Ralph Myers

Karan Kendrick as Minnie McMillian

• Destin Daniel Cretton

Writer (based on the book by)

• Bryan Stevenson
• Andrew Lanham

Cinematographer

• Brett Pawlak
• Nat Sanders
• Joel P. West

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‘Just Mercy’ Review: Echoes of Jim Crow on Alabama’s Death Row

Jamie Foxx and Michael B. Jordan star in an adaptation of a memoir by the civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson.

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‘Just Mercy’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Destin daniel cretton narrates a sequence from his film, featuring jamie foxx and rob morgan..

“Hi, my name is Destin Cretton. I’m the director of ‘Just Mercy.’ This is a scene between Walter McMillian. Played by Jamie Foxx, and Herbert Richardson, played by Rob Morgan. And they are in cells on death row in Alabama. They share a wall. They’re directly next to each other. And one of the really interesting things that I learned from speaking with Anthony Ray Hinton, who was on death row in Holman Prison for 30 years for a crime he did not commit, was the camaraderie and relationships that they had between jailmates that were completely based on conversations they were having without being able to see each other. Bryan Stevenson said in his book that you cannot really fully understand a problem unless you allow yourself to get very close to it. And that was something that we were playing with with the camera, was leading up to this very scene. The cameras started off wider on these characters. And this was the scene where we actually bring the camera as close as possible to both Walter McMillian and Herbert Richardson. And I mean, you’ll see how close we are. Their eyes are in focus. Their nose is out of focus. And the camera was literally a couple inches from their faces.” “In and out.” [BREATHING DEEPLY] “Now close your eyes.” “Our DP, Brett Pollock, was really wanting to shoot all of these jail cells scenes as close to reality as possible. So in this scene in particular, there really is just the light source that’s coming in from outside the jail cell, which gives this kind of amber hue. That is really going to be a big contrast to the moment when we go outside through Walter McMillian’s escape vision in his mind that takes him back to the moment in the beginning of the movie when he is out in the forest and looking up at the trees. To capture the performances of this scene, we actually shot with two cameras running simultaneously, with Jamie Foxx in one cell and Rob Morgan in the other— which was very helpful for a scene like this, because it was quite loose. And it allowed the two actors to really be in it and respond to each other. And both sides of the conversation were captured. So we didn’t have to do too many editing tricks for this scene.” “I don’t want you to think about nothing else. Just keep your mind on that. Everything gonna be aight.”

By A.O. Scott

Bryan Stevenson’s “Just Mercy” is a painful, beautiful, revelatory book, the kind of reading experience that can permanently alter your understanding of the world. Partly a memoir of Stevenson’s career as an activist and a lawyer specializing in death-penalty appeals, it is also a meditation on history and political morality, a clearsighted and compassionate reckoning with racism, poverty and their effects on the American criminal justice system.

The new film based on the book, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton ( “Short Term 12” ) from a script he wrote with Andrew Lanham, conveys at least some of its gravity and urgency. It focuses on an early, pivotal episode in Stevenson’s career, when he represented Walter McMillian, an Alabama man who had been sentenced to die for a murder and who insisted on his innocence.

Stevenson, played by Michael B. Jordan, is a recent graduate of Harvard Law School who arrives in Alabama in the late 1980s with a quiet idealism that many of the locals — both those who are hostile to his cause and those who support it — take for naïveté. They gently and less gently suggest that as a native of Delaware with a northern education, he can’t possibly understand the tenacity of white Southern habits of racial domination, which some of the white residents insist are not racist at all. McMillian himself, known to his family and neighbors as Johnny D (and played by Jamie Foxx), at first refuses Stevenson’s help. The injustice of his trial was so blatant that opposing it seems almost like a waste of time. Other lawyers have come and gone, taking money from Johnny D’s wife, Minnie (Karan Kendrick), and leaving him to languish on death row.

The drama of “Just Mercy” is mostly procedural. Stevenson and his colleagues, including Eva Ansley (Brie Larson), work to establish Johnny D’s alibi and to challenge the testimony of a dubious witness (Tim Blake Nelson). Stevenson also runs up against the malevolent arrogance of the sheriff (Michael Harding) who led the investigation and the duplicity of the new district attorney (Rafe Spall), whose initial politeness turns to condescension and contempt.

What is clear is that Stevenson isn’t just challenging a single conviction, but also the deep legacies of slavery and Jim Crow. Like many of the lynching victims of the past, Johnny D threatened racial hierarchies, both because he was economically independent (owning a successful pulpwood business) and because of an affair he had with a white woman. His adultery is painful for Minnie and their children, and represents an unacceptable transgression of racial and sexual taboos to the sheriff and other white people.

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Just Mercy Is a Stark True Story of Good and Evil

The biopic draws power from its faithful retelling of a man’s wrongful conviction, but risks seeming more like a news summary than a narrative work.

The finest moments of Just Mercy are the quietest, when the director, Destin Daniel Cretton, pauses to consider the simple power of freedom. The biographical film begins in 1987, the year the Alabaman logger Walter McMillian was arrested for a murder he did not commit, based on one piece of coerced testimony. Before he’s stopped by police, McMillian (played by Jamie Foxx) is working in the forest and looks up to contemplate the sky. Years later, as he waits on death row, it’s a memory he returns to again and again: a mundane glimpse of something he didn’t know he could lose.

Details like this keep the entire movie from coming off as simple stenography—a trap that many biopics fall into and that’s sometimes a problem for Just Mercy. Cretton’s film is a mostly straightforward look at the attorney Bryan Stevenson’s efforts to defend death-row inmates and exonerate the wrongly accused. Much of Just Mercy ’s plotting is procedural, tracking Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) as he moves to Montgomery, Alabama, in the early ’90s; takes up McMillian’s case, among others; and deals with community pushback while filing appeal after appeal of the wrongful conviction.

It’s a remarkable story, but a cinematically limited one, constantly in danger of seeming more like a news summary than a narrative work. No mystery surrounds McMillian’s innocence—it’s clear from the first minute that his arrest is a racist frame job, orchestrated by a sheriff who was panicking under pressure to solve the murder of a young white woman. Stevenson, whose criminal-justice work is still ongoing, is driven by his sense of morality, and his real-life heroism is dutifully represented on-screen.

As a result, Just Mercy often lacks ambiguity: Stevenson is good, McMillian is innocent, and the system that put the latter in jail is biased, heartless, and almost impossible to overcome. Cretton wisely refrains from injecting the harsh reality he depicts with the hackneyed subplots that fill out so many Hollywood-lawyer movies (a main character struggling with alcoholism, say, or a torrid affair). The trade-off for this faithfulness, though, is that Just Mercy has the energy of a documentary rather than a gripping courtroom yarn.

Even so, it’s a worthwhile viewing experience. Jordan has to tamp down his natural charisma to emphasize Stevenson’s stoicism in the face of bigotry and intimidation, but the rest of the ensemble has a little more room to maneuver. Foxx, a wonderful actor who too often finds himself in one-dimensional action roles, gives a powerhouse performance as a McMillian mostly inured to any sense of hope, expressing anguish only in brief gasps and sighs. The consistently underrated Rob Morgan (so compelling in Mudbound and The Last Black Man in San Francisco ) does heartrending work as another death-row prisoner reckoning with the acts that landed him in jail. Cretton’s regular collaborator Brie Larson is fitfully fun as Stevenson’s co-worker Eva Ansley. Villains include an over-the-top Rafe Spall as an intractable district attorney and a more nuanced (if still showy) Tim Blake Nelson as the remorseful inmate whose false testimony led to McMillian’s arrest.

While the dramatic tension of Just Mercy depends on the sheer shamelessness of local government and the community’s inability to acknowledge the truth of McMillian’s innocence, its vitality comes from subtler poetic touches. Scenes that show McMillian’s memories of liberty or his lonely prison cell echo Cretton’s best work, the riveting 2013 drama Short Term 12 , which explored the pockets of kindness and cruelty within an institutional group home for troubled teenagers. Still, despite Cretton’s efforts to keep the technical twists of the case from reading like a PowerPoint presentation, there are sections of Just Mercy ’s 136-minute running time that sag. The film’s power lies in the brutality of its true story, and yet that narrative stays within fairly conventional bounds precisely because of Cretton’s commitment to telling it.

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Bryan Stevenson, an attorney whose exceptional work is dramatized in “Just Mercy,” does not take the easy way out in his professional life, and this film tribute to him and what he’s accomplished also chooses a challenging path.

As the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, Stevenson has dedicated the past 30 years to, among other things, providing legal services to death row inmates and has saved more than 125 unjustly sentenced people from execution in the process.

As directed by Destin Daniel Cretton , “Just Mercy” focuses on Stevenson’s legal beginnings, on the first seemingly impossible case he took on.

But though it features Michael B. Jordan as the man himself, “Just Mercy” is not simply about bringing a hero to life. (Those looking for a sense of who Stevenson is and the entirety of his career should check out the fine documentary “ True Justice : Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality.”)

Rather, the film is at its most convincing when doing something more difficult: allowing us, emotionally, to feel the extent of the crisis Stevenson has made his life’s work.

As co-written by Cretton and Andrew Lanham based on Stevenson’s memoir, “Just Mercy” calmly presents a world where entrenched racism, suffocating intimidation and an all but closed legal system stack the deck, to a terrifying extent, against impoverished defendants of color.

Michael B. Jordan says Bryan Stevenson is the ‘real-life superhero’ of ‘Just Mercy’

Michael B. Jordan produced and stars in the biopic “Just Mercy,” which had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival to great acclaim.

Sept. 7, 2019

It is not for nothing that one of Stevenson’s most quoted remarks is that “the opposite of poverty is not wealth. The opposite of poverty is justice.”

A powerful asset in making these points is the film’s impressive group of supporting players (Carmen Cuba was the casting director for the film, as she was for “Queen & Slim”).

Especially effective is the group of actors (Jamie Foxx, Tim Blake Nelson, Rob Morgan, Darrell Britt-Gibson, J. Alphonse Nicholson and O’Shea Jackson, among others) who portray individuals whose lives have been mangled beyond recognition by being trapped in the machine.

Introduced first is Walter “Johnny D.” McMillian, a pulpwood worker strongly played by Foxx (who already earned a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination for his work), initially almost unrecognizable behind a thick mustache.

Almost as soon as we meet McMillian in 1987, we watch as he’s arrested in Alabama’s Monroe County by Sheriff Tom Tate (Michael Harding) on charges of murdering an 18-year-old white woman in Monroeville, which happens to be the hometown of Harper Lee, who wrote “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Though there is a brief prologue of Stevenson as a student, he’s introduced more fully as a recent Harvard Law graduate who gives his family pause when he turns down big jobs to go to Montgomery, Ala., and “fight for people who need help the most” — death row inmates.

Though he has the assistance of local activist Eva Ansley (Brie Larson, who starred in Cretton’s previous “Short Term 12” and “The Glass Castle”), Stevenson doesn’t initially understand what he’s up against with the local power structure.

A visit to Holman prison and its death row, where he endures a humiliating strip search, and a stonewalling conversation he has with the seemingly affable district attorney, Tommy Champan (a spot-on Rafe Spall), begin a process of education for both Stevenson and the audience.

Though “Just Mercy” spends time with several of the death row inmates Stevenson has represented, most of its focus is on McMillian, and the film truly comes alive when the two men meet. Foxx, throwing himself into the character, explosively expresses a total lack of confidence in, and near contempt for, this young attorney.

“What you going to do different?” he all but sneers after listing the failures of the lawyers who represented him in the past. “All they going to do is eat you alive and spit you out.”

McMillian, as it turns out, is not the first person to underestimate Stevenson’s grit, ferocious perseverance and passion for justice. Not one for grandstanding, he simply refuses to be discouraged or even consider backing down.

Stevenson eventually realizes that all roads in the McMillian case lead to Ralph Myers, a white career criminal whose questionable testimony was valued more by the jury than the numerous African American alibi witnesses the defense produced.

Myers is played with compelling eccentricity by Tim Blake Nelson , who recently starred for the Coen brothers as the very different Buster Scruggs . Myers’ shifty, twitchy, damaged personality holds us completely, and his interactions with Stevenson provide some of the film’s high points.

Another strength of “Just Mercy” is its refusal to tiptoe around what it took to make McMillian the first man ever freed from Alabama’s death row — a long, tortuous and difficult process despite compelling evidence of his innocence.

The film portrays the ferocious resistance of some people to the possibility that this man had nothing to do with the crime. And that’s when “Just Mercy” is at its best.

'Just Mercy'

Rating: PG-13 for thematic content, including racial epithets Running time: 2 hours, 17 minutes Playing: Opens Dec. 25 at AMC Century City, Arclight Hollywood

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Movie Reviews

'just mercy': an earnest, effective legal drama.

Andrew Lapin

Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) defends wrongly condemned Walter McMillan (Jamie Foxx) in Destin Daniel Cretton's film. Jake Giles Netter/Warner Bros. hide caption

Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) defends wrongly condemned Walter McMillan (Jamie Foxx) in Destin Daniel Cretton's film.

Just Mercy , the attorney Bryan Stevenson's 2014 bestseller, has already become a touchstone of criminal justice writing for helping change the conversation around capital punishment in America. It tells the true story of Stevenson's efforts to free a poor black man in Alabama, Walter McMillian, who spent six years on death row for a murder he plainly did not commit, imprisoned on flimsy evidence brought forward by a white sheriff and district attorney.

The invocation of race, class, and setting in McMillian's case is unmissable — particularly since he was from Monroeville, Alabama, home of Harper Lee and To Kill A Mockingbird , and residents seemed to be living out a remake of her novel with zero lessons learned. We're in a climate of heightened public awareness around these disparities in the criminal justice system, which means stories like this have become cultural flashpoints for reasons entirely beyond the crime itself. Case in point: The new film adaptation of Just Mercy opens one week after Curtis Flowers, a black man in Mississippi, found his own temporary relief from a two-decade legal saga that mirrors McMillian's own.

With all this weighted context, the fact that Just Mercy works is a pleasant surprise. Not only does the drama grant respect and dignity to the key figures of the original case, but writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton (adapting the book with co-writer Andrew Lanham) also touches on larger issues about the morality of the death penalty at large. The delayed exoneration of an innocent black man is a relatively straightforward narrative, one that tracks easily with audience sympathies (although the fact that this happened in the '90s, instead of the '50s, should disturb people). But to use McMillian's story to ask whether anyone , even the guilty, deserves the electric chair? That's a much thornier, more unsettling question, one more befitting the life's work of its hero.

N.C. Supreme Court Hears Arguments On Racial Bias In Death Penalty Cases

We follow Stevenson as he moves to Montgomery in 1989 to found the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit that provides legal assistance to death row cases in Alabama. The attorney is played by Michael B. Jordan, who's also a producer (as is Stevenson himself). Jordan's best-known roles ( Creed, Black Panther ) have him playing the brash young upstart with swagger for days, but here he has to bury his charisma underneath stuffy suits, legalese, and general unease. For once, his character's inexperience and outsider status work against him, although Jordan's never quite able to demonstrate what exactly is motivating this Harvard-educated Delaware native to voluntarily move to the Deep South to work on capital punishment cases for no money. The film's answer is essentially naked idealism, which is fine as things go, but it makes Stevenson seem more like a do-gooder cipher than a character.

Stevenson soon finds his ideal case in McMillian (Jamie Foxx), whose conviction for the murder of an 18-year-old white woman rested almost entirely on some fantastical witness testimony. Foxx's performance is a subtle balancing act, making McMillian a simple figure who has also seen his good faith hardened by years of unfair treatment. In testy exchanges, he maintains his innocence while also accepting, on some level, that death row has become his home.

Cretton doesn't dramatize the actual murder, keeping the film from drifting too far into lurid true-crime territory. He focuses instead on Stevenson's efforts to win the trust of McMillian's family, challenge the unsympathetic district attorney (Rafe Spall), convince a key witness (Tim Blake Nelson) to recant his testimony, and attempt to aid other men on death row at the same time. In a deeply affecting subplot, the great actor Rob Morgan ( Mudbound ) plays a mentally ill veteran who, though he's responsible for an innocent's death, is nevertheless a thinking, feeling person who must live with the knowledge that the electric chair awaits him. The scene in which he's prepared for his execution, eyebrows shaved off in silence amid the harsh yellow glare of the prison, is a vital reminder that we cannot look away from that which we choose to condone.

That Cretton makes this ambitious message work at all is in itself a sigh of relief. He's a big-hearted filmmaker with an eye for social causes, but the brilliance of his breakout film, the tender foster-care drama Short Term 12 ,was followed by the tone-deaf calamity of the memoir adaptation The Glass Castle , a movie incapable of recognizing the difference between eccentricity and outright abuse. Both starred Brie Larson, who also has a supporting role here, and though she's playing a real person (EJI's longtime operations director Eva Ansley), the script gives her no functional narrative purpose except to allow the audience to see a white face on the side of justice. In those moments and others, like a brief scene that makes no fewer than three heavily underlined references to Mockingbird , there are hints that Cretton may be too overwhelmed with the principle of what he's filming to do it justice as a film.

But ultimately Cretton pays enough attention to the tough details of McMillian's journey, and to the harsh realities of capital punishment and racism it prompts, to sell Just Mercy 's unflagging earnestness. What this movie really does well is bring the straightforward politics of a Mockingbird -esque crusading legal drama into our modern dialogue around mass incarceration and the death penalty. And even the happy ending leaves us with the unsettling knowledge that we're still far too deep in these woods.

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Just Mercy Review: A Moving Film of Integrity And Injustice

While succumbing to a small amount of melodrama, Just Mercy is ultimately a moving film about integrity, injustice, and the indictment of our criminal justice system.

Very early on in Just Mercy , you are doused in two engrossing and powerful scenes. The first is of our hero of this fact-based story, a lawyer named Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan), driving into a death row max facility in Montgomery, Alabama and seeing a dozen or so prisoners, all African-American, working in a field with guards surrounding them as they perform their manual labor. The other is a wholly demeaning visual of a prison guard making this young man strip naked as the day he was born before entering the facility to see his clients that has an uncommon power as the result of someone else’s pure ignorance.

Just Mercy chronicles the beginning of real-life and civil rights legend Bryan Stevenson’s   career while starting at the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery, Alabama after his graduation from Harvard Law. In his first case, and with the help of a local advocate Eva Ansley (Brie Larson), they take on the conviction of Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx) for the murder of 18-year-old Ronda Morrison. The case wasn’t a solid one —   in fact, there were more cracks in the case than a floor in a condemned home. With a lion’s share of evidence proving his innocence, he was sentenced to life in prison without parole, put on death row, and no one was willing to take on the politics of overturning an infamous murder; until, of course, Stevenson arrives in town defending about a half-dozen men facing capital punishment charges.

Just Mercy was directed by the man responsible for Short Term 12 , Destin Daniel Cretton, and co-wrote this adaptation with scribe Andrew Lanham ( The Kid ); their most recent collaboration was the ill-reviewed Larson vehicle, The Glass Castle . Their new film is an improvement in almost every way, basing their screenplay on Stevenson’s memoir. It’s raw, fairly straightforward without a big musical score to enhance any significant turns in the narrative. It smartly relies on the natural power and suspense of the drama that’s legally based on a true story of a wrongful conviction.

While I enjoyed its   grounded approach, I would have liked a tighter script that dealt with more clarification on why such evidence was not presented and ignored. For instance, why a tape of the main witness swearing MacMillian didn’t do it and only changed it when he was threatened with a death row charge; though, it’s obvious if you connect the dots between politics, racism, and legalized laws that practically scream Jim Crow. A more nuanced approach addressing each legal strategy that was denied would have lent more suspense and a deeper connection with the fight to set McMillian free. The script also gives way to a small amount of melodrama that wasn’t there previously by film’s end.

You don’t pay theatre ticket prices to watch a courtroom   film to quibble over details , but for the sheer nature of its storyline and the showpiece   it offers for its talented cast. This might be Jamie Foxx’s best role in years, and he commands your attention to the camera in the limited screen time he has in every frame. It’s a nice reminder of what a talented actor he has been after his string of big-budget flops.

The casting of Brie Larson brought an interesting quandary for me as here is a person who reportedly had a larger hand in the development of EJI and the cases that were displayed in the film. On   the one hand, her association with the director and star power is welcomed in the film, and the studio could have demanded an expanded role that would have made the film’s script disjointed or uneven. Although, und erwriting her role in the story is disingenuous and undervalues a woman’s role in a real case, which   is a shamefully common prac tice in most Hollywood scripts.

Michael B. Jordan does what the role asks of him; he’s slightly naive, young, idealistic, polite, yet grounded, and stoic. You can see parallels to the strength he brings that’s similar to the film’s setting of To Kill A Mockingb ird and the protagonist Atticus Finch. He shines as a real-life hero of great poise and conviction. It’s very hard to portray integrity without succumbing to a grand, divine plea before the court; I think he would have made Harper Lee proud of his interpretation of a real-life Finch, and I’m sure Stevenson does as well.

Just Mercy is well worth your time and money based on its raw power and stirring performances from its top-notch cast that doesn’t even address the standout supporting turns from Tim Blake Nelson, Oshea Jackson Jr, and a deeply felt Rob Morgan ( Mudbound ) as a death row inmate Herbert Richardson. Ultimately, it’s a moving film about integrity, injustice, and the indictment of the criminal justice system against the nation’s poor and its minorities.

Article by Marc Miller

Marc Miller (also known as M.N. Miller) joined Ready Steady Cut in April 2018 as a Film and TV Critic, publishing over 1,600 articles on the website. Since a young age, Marc dreamed of becoming a legitimate critic and having that famous “Rotten Tomato” approved status – in 2023, he achieved that status.

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Just Mercy Gets to the Heart of the Matter

Though it is, of course, important to acknowledge the intractable gloom and desperation of the world, it can be valuable—vital, really—to have some reminder of hope and its agents. The term used for such reminders, in movie and TV and book form anyway, is often “inspirational”—and yes, inspiration is a part of the equation. But there is also galvanization, a call to action or at least closer attention from afar. The upcoming film Just Mercy , which premiered here at the Toronto International Film Festival on Friday night, offers that stoking, that encouragement. It’s a rousing and moving enough film that one is compelled to excuse the limits of its artistry.

The film, from director Destin Daniel Cretton, is based on a book by Bryan Stevenson, a tireless civil rights advocate who works to free wrongly convicted people, many of them black men, from death row. Stevenson’s focuses—because our country has made them so—are matters of race and poverty, the chief factors in judicial discrimination and wrongdoing. Just Mercy largely concerns one of Stevenson’s early cases, that of Walter Macmillan, an Alabama man convicted of murdering an 18-year-old white woman in the 1980s based on evidence so absurdly flimsy and nakedly prejudiced that this story could only be true.

Cretton dutifully details the struggle to overturn the conviction, as young Stevenson (played with centered power by Michael B. Jordan ) plods his way through the backwards and booby-trapped legal system in an effort to win Macmillan, at the very least, the dignity of the truth. Macmillan is played by Jamie Foxx, making a welcome return to drama after some years acting in action movies, thrillers, and hosting a very entertaining game show. (Cretton regular Brie Larson also gives a warm turn as a local advocate who teams up with Stevenson.) Jordan and Foxx have an impassioned rapport that the director gently corrals, guiding us to the requisite big speeches at the close. These two sterling actors confidently build to those rousing moments, when true justice is finally served.

For one man, anyway. Just Mercy is careful not to suggest that the work is done after one success amid so many failures and travesties. It’s an optimistic film in the sense that it illustrates that there have been a small handful of wrongs righted. But it’s wise to the fractional reality of that, gesturing toward the broader problem of false imprisonment and state-sanctioned murder—and asking that we in the audience don’t forget it. I think the film achieves this by the end, when Just Mercy issues out its stirring message.

What comes before is plain. Cretton does not film with much flair: he shoots straightforwardly, cueing the appropriate swelling music and coaxing out actorly tears. I wish the filmmakers—and Warner Bros., which is releasing the film—trusted the weight of the story to carry a little more creative energy and nuance; Just Mercy is starved for style, making the accidental suggestion that there’s no room for poetry—for moments of transcendence—when so much is on the line.

Maybe that’s so, but I couldn’t help but wish that Cretton made a few more unexpected choices—that he resisted the easy impulse to make this a boilerplate drama and instead filled his film with the complicated idiosyncrasy of humanity.

The villains in the film—and don’t get me wrong, they are certainly villains on screen and in real life—are presented as cartoonish totems of racism, or at least squirming complicity. (The latter is embodied in a prosecutor played snivelingly by Rafe Spall .) Such outsizedly noxious people exist, of course. But there is a risk in forgetting the insidious banality of systemic racism, in not showing the outwardly decorous forms it assumes in order to survive and pervade. Just Mercy could use some of that subtlety to further drive home its crucial point: this is never solely the work of a wicked sheriff or craven attorney. It’s a whole presiding ethos, one that a startling portion of this country—many of them usually rendered as good citizens working in faith—helps sustain.

But that kind of close examination is maybe not quite so marketable for a studio film. So we instead get these rougher sketches, these general—but no less sincere —sentiments. What ultimately matters is that Stevenson and Macmillan are given their righteous due, and Just Mercy certainly achieves that. The film also takes pains to recognize that the death penalty is an atavistic cruelty that dishonors us all even for an admitted felon, someone who actually did the crime. That’s made bracingly evident in a shattering sequence in which an inmate, played by the always terrific Rob Morgan, is served his execution.

That set piece brings to mind another, more artful death row film coming later this year, the Alfre Woodard drama Clemency . That film, from writer-director Chinonye Chukwu, won the top prize at Sundance this year, but likely won’t get nearly the amount of eyeballs that Just Mercy seems destined to when it opens on Christmas Day. Still, both films have their own urgent gravity, and are worth seeking out. While Clemency shows us the horror, unadorned and devoid of comfort, Just Mercy offers a briefly heartening glimmer of a way through. Importantly, neither film finds its answer in any one person—even if Just Mercy pays noble credit to a specifically remarkable man.

Richard Lawson

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Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx shine in death row drama Just Mercy

When Bryan Stevenson ( Michael B. Jordan ) first comes to Monroe County Alabama, locals — the white ones, at least — keep telling him he needs to visit the museum dedicated to hometown hero Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird , as if that’s all he needs to know about race and justice in the American South.

It becomes a little bit of a punchline; one of not many in Just Mercy , a fact-based death-row drama that works as a blunt but effective instrument, thanks largely to its irrefutable message and the central performance of Jamie Foxx as Johnnie D., a man sentenced to die for a crime there’s almost no chance he could have committed.

It’s 1987, and Stevenson, a Delaware native straight out of Harvard Law School, believes he can help inmates like Johnnie, Herbert ( Stranger Things ‘ Rob Morgan, in a devastating turn), and Anthony ( O’Shea Jackson Jr. ) — men whose fates often hinged on not much more than an incompetent attorney or a police chief looking for a quick end to an ugly case.

Monroe County, unsurprisingly, doesn’t welcome a young black lawyer, particularly one looking to free the man they’ve already judged and juried as the killer of a white teenager named Ronda Morrisson. (It’s clear to nearly everyone else from the outset that he didn’t do it, though the movie doesn’t get around to addressing who did.)

The only real ally Stevenson finds is a local wife and mother named Eva Ansley ( Brie Larson , incognito in high-waisted jeans and a mud-colored home perm); together, they methodically rework cases whose incriminating evidence was patchy at best to begin with, and often staggeringly ill-won.

It’s solidly rewarding to watch the wheels of Mercy turn, though the direction (by Destin Daniel Cretton, who helmed 2013’s great Short Term 12 ) can’t seem to help falling into certain schematics that tend to follow movies like these: the original sin; the uplift; the leering good-old-boy sheriffs; the big-moment court scenes.

What continually floats the film is the commitment of its excellent cast, and the intrinsic truth at its core: that justice shouldn’t be divided by black and white, even if the message that delivers it sometimes is. B

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Just Mercy Stars Michael B. Jordan as a Real-Life Atticus Finch

The new drama tells a death penalty story that’s all too familiar..

Civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson may well be a living saint. In 1989, he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal organization that has successfully challenged the death row convictions of more than 125 inmates . He has been called “America’s Mandela” by Archbishop Desmond Tutu for his 30-year mission to expose and correct the pervasive racial bias ingrained in our criminal justice system. Among his countless awards and distinctions is a MacArthur grant, the money from which he poured back into his nonprofit. In a just world, he’d be stopped on the street and in restaurants by fans requesting selfies, the way the Hulk is in the Avengers movies.

But none of those accomplishments automatically lend themselves to making Stevenson a compelling cinematic hero—a fact borne out by the new legal drama Just Mercy . Based on Stevenson’s acclaimed 2014 memoir , the film follows one of his first cases, that of a black tree cutter named Walter McMillian (a disappointingly muted Jamie Foxx) falsely convicted of killing an 18-year-old white woman in small-town Alabama. (In a real-life detail that would’ve been met with eye-rolls in a movie or a novel, the life sentence that the jury recommended for McMillian was escalated to a death sentence by a judge named Robert E. Lee Key.) Just Mercy ably evokes the Kafkaesque maze that the legal system can be, particularly for economically disadvantaged suspects of color, who are too often viewed as criminals first and human beings a distant second. (Even Stevenson, played by a quietly observant Michael B. Jordan, is subject to petty and illegal humiliations by lower-ranking white officials, who find ways to exploit the lawyer’s concerns about his clients against him.) But writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton ( Short Term 12 , The Glass Castle ) rarely elevates the proceedings above a TV movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird (a novel that was written, incidentally, in the same town where Just Mercy takes place). The clear-cut morality of the plot necessitates dramatic tension or righteous fury, and Cretton delivers neither.

At the film’s start, Stevenson is an idealistic recent Harvard Law grad—but more importantly, he’s a Northerner unprepared for what might charitably be called the idiosyncrasies of rural Southern courts. (Partisans of the South may quibble with the way Just Mercy depicts racism below the Mason-Dixon Line as more blatant and backward than Northern prejudice, but the film’s implicit critique that the death penalty is applied more freely and more liberally there is true to the facts .) In the first hour, Cretton uses Stevenson as little more than an entry-point character, as he sifts through the layers of injustice in McMillian’s case, which include a laughably implausible eyewitness testimony by a white felon (Tim Blake Nelson). It’s understandable that Cretton and his co-writer Andrew Lanham didn’t want to burden an actual hero like Stevenson with contrived flaws, but the fictional version ends up studiously featureless despite Jordan’s considerable charisma and ready command of simmering rage. It doesn’t help that the actor is betrayed often by painfully earnest lines like “it’s not too late for justice,” delivered to rooms full of characters even less developed than himself.

It’s clear why Cretton and Lanham thought restraint might be the best approach: The twists and turns in Stevenson’s journey to exonerate McMillian need no embellishment. The lawyer encounters violent police harassment and a gratuitously corrupt district attorney (Rafe Spall), while Stevenson’s assistant (Cretton’s frequent collaborator Brie Larson, in a thankless role) fields bomb threats at her home. (If anything, the movie seems to play down the events in Stevenson’s memoir.) And yet all of those menaces pale next to the vicious whims of the judge who presides over Stevenson’s motions for a retrial in light of new and damning evidence. The needless cruelty of the criminal justice system feels like a world begging for more sense-making, but Just Mercy only sees its characters as heroes, victims, or obstacles, not as rational beings who might have their own reasons to knowingly commit terrible acts. Cretton’s desire to focus tightly on McMillian’s case makes sense, but he accidentally makes the white malefactors in the town more fascinating for their villainy. A TV drama like The Wire or a podcast like S-Town would have the canvas to explore complicity within these institutions, but Just Mercy paints only in black and white.

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‘just mercy’: film review | tiff 2019.

THR review: Before entering the Marvel universe with 2021's 'Shang-Chi,' Destin Daniel Cretton offers 'Just Mercy,' an Earthbound story of justice starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx.

By John DeFore

John DeFore

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A straightforward biopic that views one American’s long career of fighting injustice through the lens of an early victory he won in Alabama, Destin Daniel Cretton’s Just Mercy stars Michael B. Jordan as Bryan Stevenson, founder of that state’s Equal Justice Initiative. Having spent three decades overturning the convictions of the wrongly imprisoned and defending anyone on death row, Stevenson has been at the vanguard of a righteous fight. So it’s not surprising if the film’s edge is somewhat dulled by respect for its subject, who’s drawn here as more hero than man. A sturdy example of this genre, in which persistence and faith lead to the righting of terrible wrongs, it will likely move younger viewers who haven’t seen many like it. Those of us who have seen truly exceptional examples (in both feature and documentary form) will be content to admire Stevenson himself, and to enjoy a rich performance by Jamie Foxx as the man he saved from the electric chair.

Foxx plays small-town entrepreneur Walter McMillian, introduced to viewers in a moment of transcendence through labor: Having just felled a tall tree, he gazes up at the hole he has just opened into the sky. It’s the closest he’ll get to freedom for a long time, as he’s arrested on the drive home by cops who are longing for an excuse to shoot him on the spot. McMillian is accused of the long-unsolved murder of a local white girl and, in a parody of justice, he’s quickly sentenced to death — despite there being no physical evidence and a multitude of witnesses (all black, unfortunately) backing up his alibi.

Release date: Jan 10, 2020

Around the same period, Stevenson, a Harvard law student, is working as an intern in Georgia, where he shares a human moment with a death-row inmate whose background is similar to his own. He finishes school and, over the protests of his fearful mother, moves south to defend death-row inmates free of charge. (The script, by Cretton and Andrew Lanham, might have tossed us two lines explaining how he manages to support himself.)

In Alabama, Stevenson quickly learns how resistant the white establishment is to those who sympathize with felons. In scenes that occasionally echo some of Sidney Poitier’s onscreen confrontations with bigotry, he is stalked by men in police cruisers, kicked out of the office he has rented and even strip-searched when he first visits new clients in prison — demeaned by a bland-faced guard who grins at his humiliation.

A local who has signed on as his paralegal, Eva Ansley (frequent Cretton collaborator Brie Larson , in a throwaway sidekick role), lets her boss move into and work out of her home, sharing work space with her son’s toys. But as their work raises eyebrows in town, the situation becomes difficult: Older viewers will immediately know that when a phone rings at night, and a young boy says, “It’s for you, Mom,” there’s about to be a racist on the line issuing death threats.

Of all the incarcerated men whose cases Stevenson takes up, McMillian’s a holdout — sure that fighting his conviction is pointless and that this young lawyer will be no better than the last, who disappeared as soon as the family’s money ran out. (Bryan hears lots of variants of “that’s exactly what the last guy said.”) But when Stevenson arranges a meeting with Walter’s wife (Karan Kendrick) and supporters, his seriousness is impossible to deny. Walter agrees to work with him, setting the film on its largely familiar procedural trek through shocking evidence of malfeasance, thwarted legal maneuvers and eventual triumph in a courtroom bathed in sunlight.

The story is most involving at its margins: Walter’s friendships with the men (O’Shea Jackson and Rob Morgan) stuck in the cells next to his, for example; or scenes in which Stevenson tries to get the felon whose false testimony got McMillian convicted (Tim Blake Nelson) to admit that he lied. And in one or two harrowing moments, the film communicates the way Stevenson’s up-close interaction with the institution of capital punishment informed his work. But as played by Jordan, this crusader is more Boy Scout than Erin Brockovich — a steadfast champion of the downtrodden with none of the complications that make characters breathe onscreen.

Jordan serves as straight man for the beaten-down magnetism of Foxx, whose character understands things about the world the younger man can’t fathom. A couple of Foxx’s scenes are transfixing enough to make you hold your breath without realizing it. The big courtroom moments the pic constructs for Stevenson, by contrast, sound like prepackaged American idealism. That’s not to deny that everything he says is 100 percent true; but speeches don’t always make for great movies, even in courtrooms where they beg to be delivered.

Production companies: Gil Netter Productions, Outlier Society Distributor: Warner Bros. Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx, Brie Larson, Rob Morgan, Tim Blake Nelson, Rafe Spall, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Karan Kendrick Director: Destin Daniel Cretton Screenwriters: Destin Daniel Cretton, Andrew Lanham Producers: Gil Netter, Asher Goldstein, Michael B. Jordan Executive producers: Mike Drake, Daniel Hammond, Gabriel Hammond, Michael B. Jordan, Charles D. King, Niija Kuykendall, Bryan Stevenson, Jeff Skoll Director of photography: Brett Pawlak Production designer: Sharon Seymour Costume designer: Francine Jamison-Tanchuck Editor: Nat Sanders Composer: Joel P. West Casting director: Carmen Cuba Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Gala Presentations)

Rated PG-13, 136 minutes

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Just Mercy review – death row drama with quiet power

Jamie Foxx and Michael B Jordan excel in this understated true-life story of US lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s battle to free an Alabama man wrongfully convicted of murder

A dapted from activist lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s 2014 memoir, subtitled “A Story of Justice and Redemption”, Destin Daniel Cretton’s timely legal drama is, for the most part, as admirably understated as its subject. Largely eschewing dramatic speechifying in favour of quieter contextualisation, it offers a movingly matter-of-fact account of one man’s struggle to lend voice to the silenced, dispossessed inmates of death row. As with the book, the film frames its wider story of poverty, prejudice and institutional racism within an infamous miscarriage of justice – the case of Walter McMillian , an African American condemned to death for a crime that he evidently did not commit. Yet as the intelligently accessible script by Cretton and Andrew Lanham makes clear, McMillian’s case is not the whole picture; rather, it is a totemic example of how a socioeconomic system forged within the furnace of slavery still bears the shackles of its past.

We open in 1987, in Monroe County, Alabama, where pulpwood tree feller McMillian (an almost unrecognisably unimposing Jamie Foxx) is arrested for the murder of white teenager Ronda Morrison. Billboards boast about Monroeville being Harper Lee’s hometown (“Check out the Mockingbird museum,” says Rafe Spall’s district attorney, “it’s one of the great civil rights landmarks of the south”), but the spirit of Atticus Finch does not appear to haunt these halls of justice. By the time the Harvard-educated Stevenson (Michael B Jordan) starts defending death row inmates, McMillian – aka Johnny D – is awaiting execution with little hope of reprieve and even less faith in lawyers. Yet as co-founder of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), Stevenson is determined to make a difference, and despite his would-be client’s initial dismissals, he makes the journey out to McMillian’s impoverished old neighbourhood to meet the friends and family who know he couldn’t have done it.

For those not already au fait with the credibility-defying details of the real-life case (famously shown on the US news programme 60 Minutes in 1992), I’ll allow the movie to weave its procedural spell, as the revelation of key facts undermines the state’s conviction. Suffice to say that it doesn’t take much scratching before everything starts to fall apart, incurring the hostility of a community (both civil and legal) with much invested in keeping the Morrison case firmly closed.

Posters for Just Mercy are emblazoned with quotes justifiably extolling the film’s “Oscar-worthy” performances, and it’s easy to see its absence from the recent nominations as further evidence that #OscarsSoWhite still applies, a feeling amplified by the similarly depressing lack of recognition for stand-out 2019 turns from the likes of Lupita Nyong’o , Jennifer Lopez , Awkwafina , Song Kang-ho et al. Yet the overlooking of Cretton’s movie may have just as much to do with its lack of Oscar-friendly grandstanding, and the fact that, unlike last year’s best picture winner, Green Book , it feels horribly contemporary.

In his excellent 2015 interview with Stevenson for this paper, headlined “America’s Mandela” (a term coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu), Tim Adams refers repeatedly to Stevenson’s habitual underplaying of any idea of heroism, describing him speaking “quietly and exactly” and noting the “measured, anecdotal” style of his writing in the face of “barely credible inhumanity”. These are the attributes that chime with Cretton’s film-making CV, dating back to his 2013 feature debut, the South by Southwest festival favourite Short Term 12 , and the autobiographically inspired 2008 short that preceded it. Rami Malek, Lakeith Stanfield and Brie Larson all had early roles in Cretton’s acclaimed debut, and Larson returns to work with Cretton again in Just Mercy (as she did in his 2017 oddity The Glass Castle ) in the crucial but low-key role of EJI co-founder Eva Ansley. It’s a defiantly unshowy supporting performance, helping to tell the story without ever stealing the spotlight.

Other ensemble roles are equally un-self-serving, a quality that usually proves to be Kryptonite for awards voters. O’Shea Jackson Jr and Rob Morgan are utterly convincing as Anthony Ray Hinton and Herbert Richardson, fellow death row inmates whose guilt or innocence becomes secondary to the grotesque spectre of capital punishment, which is evoked with as much impact as in Tim Robbins’s Oscar-feted 1995 drama Dead Man Walking . Darrell Britt-Gibson lends nervy energy to the role of reluctant witness Darnell Houston, while Tim Blake Nelson is convincingly bent out of shape as McMillian’s primary accuser. As for Foxx and Jordan, their dialled-down discipline pays dividends, lending greater weight to those few moments (a courtroom showdown, a jailhouse breakdown) when Cretton briefly turns up the dramatic heat, with rousing results.

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“Just Mercy” and the Challenges of Depicting Real-Life Heroes

“Just Mercy” is one of the rare films that, in addressing a specific injustice, reaches below the surface of the action to reveal the systemic inequities that cause it to happen. Based on a true story, the movie presents the conviction, incarceration, and planned execution of an innocent black person in a way that indicts the biased justice system that is faced by black people over all in the United States.

The movie is centered on Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan), a young black man from Delaware who graduates from Harvard Law. In 1987, he travels to Monroeville, Alabama, to join a white administrative director, Eva Ansley (Brie Larson), in an organization that provides death-row inmates with legal representation. In the course of their work, Stevenson discovers that Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx), nicknamed Johnny D., was wrongly convicted of the crime for which he’s facing execution. What’s more, the case reveals itself to be based on a complete fabrication of evidence by a white sheriff and a white prosecutor, unchallenged by a white public defender, unquestioned by a white judge, and accepted by an all-white jury. McMillian, who has had prior appeals denied, is resigned to his fate. He does not want to reopen the case and reawaken hopes only to see them dashed again. But Stevenson is confident that, with his own local investigation of the evidence, he can bring an appeal to a higher court and have the conviction overturned.

From the start, the movie presents the obstacles that Stevenson and Ansley face in their efforts—social obstacles, rooted in racism, some of which are masked as impersonal official actions. Racism is at the very root of the story: the original case against McMillian was brought because he was hated by whites for having had an affair with a white woman. Stevenson and Ansley’s effort to rent an office is rejected by a white building manager on the grounds that their work will prove controversial. A white prosecutor arrests, on fabricated charges, a black man who is planning to offer testimony that would exonerate McMillian. Sometimes, the menace is physical and violent: when Stevenson arrives at the prison where McMillian is being held, he is subjected, illegally, to a strip search by a white guard; a bomb threat, laced with racist insults, is called in to Ansley’s home; and, while driving, Stevenson is pulled over by two white police officers who intimidate him, insult him, and hold a gun at his head.

The drama is infuriating—and devastating, because it presents, clearly and unflinchingly, the agonies endured by those who are wrongly convicted and unjustly executed, as well as those suffered by their families and their community. The director, Destin Daniel Cretton (whose film “Short Term 12,” from 2013, featured Larson’s first prominent performance), presents scenes of solidarity and friendship among the death-row inmates, principally those in McMillians’s nearby cells: Herbert Richardson (Rob Morgan), a mentally ill Vietnam War veteran, and Ray Hinton (O’Shea Jackson, Jr.), a hearty young man who tries to keep his neighbors’ spirits up. Stevenson’s visit to the McMillian household, when he makes his pitch to the skeptical family to reopen the case, is the first of many scenes throughout the film that display the collective mobilization of Monroeville’s black residents on McMillian’s behalf, and their despair at the legally enshrined injustices that they must endure. The state of race relations in the town reflects what the scholar Michelle Alexander, in her groundbreaking book , calls the “new Jim Crow” of mass incarceration. It’s alluded to in a shocking scene in which the town’s sheriff (Michael Harding) accuses Stevenson of being a Northern interloper looking to expose the racist behavior of Southern whites toward black residents—whom he calls by the N-word.

“Just Mercy” is a drama of immense power; its vision of the possibility of individual triumphs over systematic persecution is guardedly hopeful, and its depiction of the dysfunctional justice system itself looks ahead to the possibility of progress. Yet, for all the glimmers of hopefulness that the film offers, it remains peculiarly impersonal. It’s not a bio-pic, because there’s very little bio in the movie. Stevenson’s heroism is a monumental one—both in scale and in form. His parents are seen in a brief early glimpse; otherwise, the movie shows almost nothing of his personal life—mainly, that he’s a churchgoer and a runner. The action covers six years, from 1987 through 1993, yet it limits Stevenson to his professional functions. For that matter, he engages in some rather brilliant, large-scale strategizing that propels the case into the national spotlight, but this seems to happen in the wink of an eye, without any sense of his strategy or his effective behind-the-scenes action involving a wide-ranging network of connections. The barriers to such dramatic intimacy are endemic to the current cinema and, in particular, to political movies based on true stories, in which there is little room to deviate from the main narrative of events—and apt hesitation to go beyond the documented record of public or quasi-public activities. Yet the result is that Stevenson comes off as a principled, courageous, and brilliant lawyer, rather than as a complete person who does such historic work; he remains opaque.

Meanwhile, there’s an entire set of characters whose connection between their personal lives and their professional actions are at the very core of the movie but whose private existence is similarly rendered invisible: the white racist officials on whose practices the entire drama depends. Watching such characters behave monstrously in the ostensibly dispassionate dispatch of their public duties, I found myself wondering: How do they live with themselves? A work of fiction can do what a stereotypical journalistic visit to MAGA -hatted diner patrons cannot: it can dramatize the underlying patterns of thought, the embedded nexus of beliefs and practices, the connections between official action and ordinary life that perpetuate and defend the oppressions that the movie so effectively depicts and decries.

Adding an element of fiction can be dangerous, though, as suggested by the frequent criticism that a director or author “humanizes” a villain, which is why it’s a severe test of artistry. Conversely, the honor and respect rightly accorded to heroes such as Stevenson often get in the way of dramatizing the struggles of their daily lives and the conflicts in their inner lives that they overcome in their devoted pursuit of justice. Fictionalizing parts of a story also risks gross distortions, such as Clint Eastwood’s grotesque characterization of the journalist Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde) in “ Richard Jewell .” But it’s precisely in confronting such risks responsibly and discerningly—and surmounting them to create a wider-ranging, more complex drama—that a powerful and vital film such as “Just Mercy” can move into the forefront of American political discourse, where it belongs.

Just Mercy Review

17 Jan 2020

It’s said that the worst thing you can give someone on death row is hope. It’s a theory that drives urgent legal drama Just Mercy , the real-life story of crusading civil rights defence attorney Bryan Stevenson (Jordan) that confronts the systemic racism at the heart of the American penal system.

1980s Alabama and ‘Johnny D’ McMillan (Foxx) is facing death by electric chair after being wrongly convicted of the murder of a white woman. The system that sent him to prison isn’t just corrupt on an individual level, but riddled with a widespread corruption that actively works to end the lives of innocent black men.

Into this brutal landscape strides Harvard graduate Bryan Stevenson, a full-hearted, righteous law graduate, who quickly has chunks knocked out of his optimism by both the discrimination he sees first-hand and McMillan’s rejection of his help. What the lawyer initially can’t comprehend is that hope can destroy too. For it’s hope that is so often inevitably dashed. That each man who sits on death row has witnessed it evaporate under the boots of the men who’ve taken the short walk to the execution chamber.

The chemistry between Jordan and Foxx is by turns brittle, intimate and warm — the two having known each other off screen since the former was just a boy. Individually, they each put in arresting performances. Michael B. Jordan carries Stevenson with a constantly shifting mix of pride, hope, anger, fear — digging into a fairly by-the-numbers arc to unearth nuance that other actors would likely have struggled to.

Where the film suffers is in the storytelling: the broad brushstrokes from director Destin Daniel Cretton’s hand offering no real room for great subtlety.

Jamie Foxx, however, is something else: it’s easily one of the performances of his career — arguably only Ray has seen him better. His Johnny D has a quiet, furious power that you can feel in every jaw clench, every muscle moved. The actor’s spoken of his father’s experiences — he was imprisoned for seven years for a minor crime — and it’s hard not to see a personal hurt coursing through him.

The brutality and horror of death row is iterated powerfully here; from the minor humiliations that keep the men bowed to the smell of the burnt flesh of other prisoners. That said, where the film suffers is in the storytelling: the broad brushstrokes from director Destin Daniel Cretton’s hand offering no real room for great subtlety. The complexity on display within the actors’ character work is not carried through to the wider direction.

And the biggest surprise — given her pedigree — is the light work given to Brie Larson as Stevenson’s colleague Eva Ansley. While this is clearly not her story, and nor should it be, her screen time is sparse and unmemorable. With little back story, context or motivation, her character barely registers.

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Review: Just Mercy Film

Sheryl van horne, author name here.

• June 1, 2020
• Volume 6 - Issue 1

Just Mercy emphasizes social justice, enumerating the variety of flaws of a criminal justice system blinded by racism and handicapped by poverty. Just Mercy was directed by Destin Daniel Cretton in 2019, and stars Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx, Rob Morgan, Tim Blake Nelson, Rafe Spall, Karan Kendrick, and Brie Larson. The basis of the film is Bryan Stevenson’s memoir of the same title, which chronicles his quest for justice and highlights his pleas for mercy. Both the film and the book expose the racial and economic inequalities that lead to differential treatment in the criminal justice system. The pursuit of social justice, challenging the unequal status quo, and maintaining hope are at the film’s core. The blame for injustice is largely placed on individuals through incompetent legal representation, police misconduct, and a biased judge rather than systemic racial and economic disparities. In addition to injustice, nature and family play a significant role in the film, underscoring traditional Christian values.

In Just Mercy , Bryan Stevenson, a devout Christian and graduate of both Eastern University and Harvard law school, sets out on a journey of hope to effect change in the justice system by focusing on the most disadvantaged individuals. Inspired by an internship at Harvard where he worked on death row cases, he moves from his family home in Delaware to Alabama. In a particularly moving scene, Bryan tells Henry Davis, who is on death row, that he will not be executed in the next year and Henry responds with tears in his eyes how wonderful the news is. They bond over church choir and growing up poor. Henry is then forced back to his cell violently, but instead of anger or sorrow, he sings an uplifting hymn.

In 1986 Rhonda Morrison, an eighteen year old, is shot to death at her place of work. But she is not the only victim. The majority of the film centers around her wrongfully convicted killer, Walter McMillian. Walter McMillian’s story begins in the dense trees of a forest where a few men are cutting down a tree in Monroe County, Alabama. The audience hears the harsh loud sounds of the chainsaw and the tree falls. Walter looks up to the sky to see the sun streaming through the space he created in the forest canopy. While on his way home, he is arrested and his life changes forever. The police officer, who clearly knows McMillian (a.k.a. Johnny D) and his sexual escapades with white women, taunts him, telling Johnny D to run and indicating he would “be happy to get this over with.” Later nature contrasts with the very unnatural situation individuals like Walter McMillian find themselves in once they are behind prison bars. His arrest arises from bigotry and procedural injustices that are revealed as the film progresses.

Although Walter McMillian’s case dominates the film, other cases are briefly displayed, which help to more accurately represent an attorney’s workload and Bryan Stevenson’s legacy. As a film with a moral to the story, it is best to have one narrative in which the audience becomes invested so the depth and quantity of the failings of the criminal justice system are exposed. However, the other brief narratives also serve other purposes—to highlight different outcomes, demonstrate the variety of cases of injustice and prejudice, and further emphasize the extent of change needed. For example, through Herbert Lee Richardson’s case, the audience sympathizes with someone who has committed a violent crime. Richardson is a repentant veteran who suffers from mental illness, an issue that had not been brought up in his criminal trial.

Further, the critique of the system does not just indict the court process and court actors, but also the police, depicting racism and police misconduct. Through Bryan Stevenson’s eyes, the viewer experiences the distrust of the police and racial bias within the criminal justice system. The police clearly violate the law repeatedly, including arresting a young African American male for perjury because he made a statement that contradicted an aspect of a prior conviction. As part of the investigation, individuals are brought to death row, in stark violation of the law. Even African American lawyers are not immune to police misconduct. Bryan himself is stopped and harassed by police without any reason given and is also mistreated by a correctional officer.

While the criminal justice system can tear people apart, families support and guide each other. Henry McMillian’s wife stands by his side and professes his innocence despite Henry’s infidelity. Additionally, only after Bryan Stevenson visits his family does Henry agree to allow him to work on his case. Another break in the case involves the key witness, Ralph Meyers, who lied in the initial case. Once Ralph discovers the man he helped convict had kids, he tells the truth. Another example of the influence of family involves the prosecutor. As he and his family watch the airing of the McMillian story, she gives him a look of disgust after hearing him express his continued support of Henry’s conviction. Thus, the stability and significance of family offsets some of the chaos the criminal justice system creates.

Overall, the film is largely true to the book, especially in keeping with the main themes, but it does take some artistic license bringing the narrative to life. Through amazing cinematography and evocative music, Destin Daniel Cretton depicts a struggle for justice that is both frustrating, and rewarding. The structure of the film keeps the audience interested and aware that the film is based on a true story. A rather unique aspect to the film is that three individuals on whose appeals Bryan Stevenson worked are interviewed in the film. They briefly tell their stories to the camera and each one describes issues with their initial trial attorneys. Just before the credits, after the McMillian cases finishes with the civil trial, there is actual footage of Bryan Stevenson at Ray Hinton’s release from death row. This serves as a reminder that this is not a fictional story, but an account based on the harsh realities of a cruel system that has different rules based on skin pigmentation and money.

The editing, casting, acting, and sound all add to the drama and suspense. The editing is well done, allowing for a good deal of the story to be told visually. The casting is stellar, as the acting is superb. Each character feels authentic. The imperfection of the individuals depicted enhances the realism, increasing their humanity and likability. The film recognizes that we are all sinners, which adds to our humanity. Bryan Stevenson notes, “each of us is more than the worst thing that we’ve ever done.” In addition, the film’s sound amplifies the dramatic element, guiding our emotions. The clank of the entire cellblock as someone is executed or ecstatically leaves the prison creates a loud and powerful emotive reaction. The music complements the serious nature of the narrative and ties in Christian themes. Numerous hymns underscore Christian values followed by Bryan Stevenson and his clients and pair well with the events of the film.

For anyone who is interested in the pursuit of justice, or who needs to be equally inspired and angered, this film is a must-see. It triggers a wide range of emotions. At times humor is used to diffuse the seriousness of the situation. At other times, the film evokes tears of joy, sadness, and frustration. Through the wins and losses, one point remains—so much more work needs to be done to improve the lives of Americans in our criminal justice system. As Bryan Stevenson points out in the film, “The opposite of poverty is justice… The character of our nation isn’t reflected in how we treat the rich and the privileged, but how we treat the poor, the disfavored, and condemned.” Perhaps if more people experience this film, change could happen and we could start viewing individuals who are convicted of crime as human beings and treat them accordingly, loving thy neighbor as God intended. After all, as Bryan Stevenson states, “We all need justice. We all need mercy. And perhaps, we all need some measure of unmerited grace.”

Cretton, D.D. (Director) (2019) Just Mercy [Film] Warner Brothers.

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Saving private ryan moment that feels like movie magic is accurate, says wwii historian, how mike flanagan's next stephen king adaptation will be different from his past movies.

After rising up the A-list thanks to  Creed's success, Michael B. Jordan is now using his clout to serve as a producer on projects, helping a wide range of stories reach a mainstream audience. His latest vehicle is legal drama  Just Mercy , which held its world premiere at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival and is finally playing nationwide following a limited theatrical release. With  Just Mercy drawing from an emotional true story and featuring a talented cast, there was some thought going in that it could be a viable Oscar contender for Warner Bros. That ultimately didn't pan out, but the film is still a rewarding experience worth checking out.  Just Mercy is a powerful, if standard, tale of fighting for justice, buoyed by director Destin Daniel Cretton's steady hand and solid performances.

Jordan stars in  Just Mercy as Bryan Stevenson, a Harvard Law student who moves to Alabama after graduation. Working alongside Eva Ansley (Brie Larson), Bryan starts Equal Justice Initiative, which provides legal services to inmates on death row. One of Bryan's clients is Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx), an African-American man convicted of murdering a white woman. Discovering McMillian's initial trial consisted of faulty testimony and evidence, Bryan is convinced he can build a case that proves Walter is innocent, but faces numerous obstacles along the way.

Related: Just Mercy Cast & Character Guide

From the get-go, it's clear  Just Mercy has something to say about systematic racism and corruption that continues to plague America to this day. Fortunately, Cretton (who also co-wrote the script) is able to walk the tightrope and prevents the film from getting overly preachy in its themes and messaging, instead allowing it to feel urgent and timely. He treats the subject matter with the amount of care and respect it deserves, highlighting the frustrating injustices the underprivileged face on a regular basis. Ultimately,  Just Mercy is a story about doing the right thing, transcending beyond its obvious racial components and becoming something far more universal. Cretton doesn't shy away from some ugly truths, painting a truly harrowing picture that's brutal and effective.

Cretton brings an understated technical approach to  Just Mercy , which benefits the final product in the sense the film never calls attention to itself and allows viewers to focus squarely on the characters and their interactions. The director and his crew (which includes production designer Sharon Seymour and cinematographer Brett Pawlak) do a good job bringing small-town 1990s Alabama to life, though they don't exactly reinvent the wheel in regards to how  Just Mercy is presented. That, along with the (somewhat) predictable narrative trajectory the movie follows, prevents it from reaching full greatness, but this is still a fine example of formula done right that remains engaging throughout its runtime.

Jordan delivers a characteristically genuine turn as a man who (in the film's words) is  "married to his work." As good as he is, Jordan has a stellar supporting cast around him. Foxx adds another great performance to his résumé, further showcasing his range by tapping into Walter's grounded sense of humanity. He's the one generating the most awards buzz, but he's arguably outshined by others in the ensemble, most notably Rob Morgan as Walter's fellow inmate Herbert Richardson. Morgan gives an incredibly nuanced and heartbreaking turn that's extremely moving. His scenes are among the most memorable in the film. Granted, a few actors draw the short straw here (Larson's Eva is relatively one-note), but  Just Mercy consists of strong work across the board, with everyone making the most of what they're given to work with.

With the 2020 Oscar nominations coming out in just a few days,  Just Mercy is not expected to be much of a contender in major categories, which could deter cinephiles from making plans to check it out. Still, viewers shouldn't let the lack of accolades dissuade them, as  Just Mercy is a well-crafted and well-acted legal drama that speaks to ongoing problems that should have been resolved years ago. It may not push the envelope or be as innovative as other films out right now, but  Just Mercy is nevertheless able to captivate the audience and could even inspire people to try to make a difference. If nothing else, MCU fans should take an interest in  Just Mercy , which suggests  Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings is in solid hands with Cretton.

More: Just Mercy Official Trailer

Just Mercy is now playing in U.S. theaters. It runs 136 minutes and is rated PG-13 for thematic content including some racial epithets.

Just Mercy is a historical drama film that tells the true story of young lawyer Bryan Stevenson and his history-making battle for justice. After graduating from Harvard, Bryan decides to skip the lucrative job opportunities offered to him. Instead, he heads to Alabama to defend those wrongly condemned, with the support of local advocate Eva Ansley. 

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Just Mercy dramatizes a real-life injustice with solid performances, a steady directorial hand, and enough urgency to overcome a certain degree of earnest advocacy.

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This powerful and moving indictment of racism in 1980s’ Alabama gets right to the heart of the matter.

Jamie Foxx and Michael B. Jordan

Based on a true story, this is the account by Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan), a young black lawyer fresh out of Harvard in 1987 and his wish to give help to the people who needed it most, the predominantly black prisoners on Death Row. He moves from the relative peace of Delaware to the warzone that was Alabama – the deeply racist state in the Deep South of the USA. There, against much local opposition, he sets up an Equal Justice Initiative. This is Monroeville, home of Harper Lee, the author famous for writing  To Kill a Mockingbird , an abiding classic novel about class and racism in America. The local dignitaries including the Sheriff and the District Attorney seem to be proud of their association with Lee but it doesn’t change their attitudes towards African-American citizens. However, despite not holding proper investigations into crimes that may or may not have involved a black citizen, they still recommend a visit to the local Mockingbird Museum! This is what Stevenson was up against. In order to close an investigation into the murder of a white teenage girl, the Alabama authorities accepted phoney evidence offered by a known criminal and subsequently incarcerated the wrong person, Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx), a black man who just happened to be in the vicinity at the time of the murder. With no real evidence McMillian is indicted merely because he is the kind of man who might have done the crime – i.e. because he is black. With the aid of fellow activist Eva Ansley (Brie Larson) Stevenson works at getting McMillian and two other inmates off Death Row. The story is a harrowing one but co-writer and director Destin Daniel Cretton recounts it without any sensationalism. He evinces an excellent performance from Jordan as Stevenson, who visibly grows on screen from tyro law graduate into a fully-fledged attorney who offers hope to those who have given up. Equally impressive is Brie Larson as his comrade-in-arms, Eva Ansley, while Jamie Foxx gives a heartbreaking performance as the embittered and almost totally lost McMillian. Good work too comes from Rafe Spall as a particularly nasty local prosecutor, O’Shea Jackson Jr as McMillan’s fellow inmate, and Rob Morgan as a Vietnam War victim whose mental state should have put him in hospital, not jail. MICHAEL DARVELL Cast : Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx, Brie Larson, Tim Blake Nelson, Rob Morgan, Rafe Spall, O’Shea Jackson Jr, Karan Kendrick, J. Alphonse Nicholson, Darrell Britt-Gibson, Michael Harding, Lindsay Ayliffe, Rhoda Griffis, Claire Bronson, Andrene Ward-Hammond.

Dir  Destin Daniel Cretton,  Pro  Gil Netter, Asher Goldstein and Michael B. Jordan,  Screenplay  Destin Daniel Cretton and Andrew Lanham, based on the book  Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption  by Bryan Stevenson,  Ph Brett Pawlak,  Pro Des  Sharon Seymour,  Ed  Nat Sanders,  Music  Joel P. West,  Costumes  Francine Jamison-Tanchuck.

Endeavour Content/One Community/Participant Media/Macro Media/Gil Netter Productions/Outlier Society-Warner Bros.  136 mins. USA. 2019. Rel: 17 January 2020. Cert. 12A.

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Common Sense Media Review

Effective, intense drama about racism and justice; swearing.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Just Mercy is a fact-based courtroom drama that tackles the subjects of racism and the death penalty. It centers on idealistic young lawyer Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan), who travels to Alabama to help save a wrongfully convicted man on Death Row (Jamie Foxx). It has strong…

Why Age 13+?

Language includes multiple uses of "s--t" and the "N" word, plus "bulls--t," "so

Upsetting execution scene that includes pretty much everything except the actual

Dr. Pepper vending machine shown, Coke mentioned. Sunkist orange soda mentioned

Beer. Cigarette smoking.

During a forced strip-search, Bryan is shown shirtless; he removes his pants and

Any Positive Content?

Every life has meaning. Very strong messages about importance of doing the right

Bryan Stevenson is portrayed as a very positive role model, achieving his law de

Language includes multiple uses of "s--t" and the "N" word, plus "bulls--t," "son of a bitch," "bitch," "ass," "shut your mouth," and "damn."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

Upsetting execution scene that includes pretty much everything except the actual death. A police officer points his gun at the main character. Character is beaten. Spoken references to violence, including a murder ("strangled and shot"), the planting of a bomb, and a character being burned. Hateful, racism-motivated acts (forced strip-search, etc.). Moments of anger/rage. Implied suicide attempt. A character is told to "bend over and spread."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Dr. Pepper vending machine shown, Coke mentioned. Sunkist orange soda mentioned and shown. Jujyfruits candy mentioned and shown. Jif peanut butter jar shown.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

During a forced strip-search, Bryan is shown shirtless; he removes his pants and underwear below the frame. Sex-related dialogue.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Every life has meaning. Very strong messages about importance of doing the right thing, no matter the odds, fighting hard for those who need it the most, and problematic relationship between bigotry and justice. Black people in a small, Southern town are targeted by the law based on how they look, and movie clearly points out how wrong that is. It also depicts what an uphill battle it is to change hearts and minds; this is about one small victory in a bigger fight.

Positive Role Models

Bryan Stevenson is portrayed as a very positive role model, achieving his law degree from Harvard, deliberately choosing to work in a place that could be physically dangerous to him, working for free for the folks who need him most. He faces difficult odds, keeps persevering. Eva is also a positive role model, giving her time and her house to the cause, though she has less to do, is seen here mainly offering her support for Bryan. Walter has made some poor choices in the past, but he's no murderer, and once his faith in Bryan is established, he works hard to help with his case.

Parents need to know that Just Mercy is a fact-based courtroom drama that tackles the subjects of racism and the death penalty. It centers on idealistic young lawyer Bryan Stevenson ( Michael B. Jordan ), who travels to Alabama to help save a wrongfully convicted man on Death Row ( Jamie Foxx ). It has strong language, including multiple uses of "s--t" and the "N" word. There are also some violent and/or upsetting scenes, including a police officer pointing his gun at Bryan's head and the lead-up to a character's death by execution. But violence is primarily conveyed through dialogue, including discussions of murder (shooting and strangulation), the planting of a bomb, and a character getting burned. There are also moments of anger and hate/racism. Bryan is forced to strip for a search; he's humiliated as he removes his shirt and (below the frame) pants and underwear. There's also brief, mild sex-related dialogue, and brief smoking and beer drinking. The story isn't surprising, but it's very effective, with clear messages of perseverance, the importance of doing the right thing, fighting hard for those who need it the most, and the problematic relationship between bigotry and justice. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (13)
• Kids say (19)

Based on 13 parent reviews

Real world story of racial injustices in the death penalty

A moving film, what's the story.

In JUST MERCY, young lawyer Bryan Stevenson ( Michael B. Jordan ) decides, after completing an internship helping Death Row inmates, to devote himself to the cause full-time. He moves to Monroeville, Alabama (home of Harper Lee ), teams up with Eva Ansley ( Brie Larson ), and starts focusing on the case of Walter "Johnny D." McMillian ( Jamie Foxx ). Johnny D. was accused and convicted of killing a teen girl based on the testimony of two unreliable witnesses. Bryan thinks it will be easy to prove that Johnny D. was nowhere near the crime scene at the time of the murder, but he quickly finds that the white establishment in Alabama isn't so eager to allow a convicted murderer back out on the street, no matter what the evidence says. Can Bryan find justice for his client?

Is It Any Good?

It follows a pretty traditional arc, but this prison/courtroom drama is still effectively tense and moving thanks to fine performances and the picture it presents of simmering racial injustice. Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton , Just Mercy almost always feels like a movie. All of the familiar beats, speeches, and plot turns happen just when they're supposed to, without the messiness of life coming into it (as it did so vividly in Cretton's remarkable breakthrough feature, Short Term 12 ). But the film quickly establishes a good sense of place, from Bryan suffering the indignities of being Black in Alabama to the large gathering of friends and neighbors at the home of Johnny D.'s family when Bryan goes to see them.

Just Mercy also offers a slate of solid supporting characters -- including a subtly menacing district attorney ( Rafe Spall ), a candy-munching convict ( Tim Blake Nelson ), and Johnny D.'s next-cell neighbors on Death Row ( O'Shea Jackson Jr. and Rob Morgan ) -- all of whom add to the movie's texture. Then, as the pieces of the puzzle come together, occasionally blocked by bigotry and corruption, the tension and excitement start to ramp up. The final piece is Foxx, who's very good as Johnny D., hardened and reluctant to hope anymore. In the moments he does actually find hope, his emotion is palpable.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Just Mercy 's violence. Given that the movie chooses not to show its most violent acts, does that make the movie less violent?

Is Bryan Stevenson a role model ? How does he demonstrate perseverance ?

How does the movie portray racism? How about the relationship between racism and justice/the law?

How accurate do you think this movie is to events as they actually happened? Why might filmmakers choose to alter the facts in a movie that's based on a true story? Check out the documentary version of Bryan's story.

To Kill a Mockingbird is referenced many times in this movie. How does that story compare to this one?

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 25, 2019
• On DVD or streaming : March 27, 2020
• Cast : Michael B. Jordan , Jamie Foxx , Brie Larson
• Director : Destin Daniel Cretton
• Inclusion Information : Asian directors, Black actors, Female actors
• Studio : Warner Bros.
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Activism
• Character Strengths : Perseverance
• Run time : 136 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : thematic content including some racial epithets
• Award : NAACP Image Award - NAACP Image Award Winner
• Last updated : August 21, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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The Shawshank Redemption

A Few Good Men

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Film Review: Just Mercy Finds Hollywood Celebrating Real-Life Heroes for a Change

Jamie Foxx leans into his Oscar-winning talents for this star-studded historical drama

This review originally ran in September as part of our TIFF 2019 coverage.

The Pitch: Based on a true story, and on the book of the same name by Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy follows the establishment of the EJI and one of its first groundbreaking cases. Fresh out of Harvard law in 1989, Stevenson ( Michael B Jordan ) turns down cushy law firm prospects in order to move to Monroe County, Alabama and help disenfranchised prisoners. With the help of Eva Ansley ( Brie Larson ), a budding local activist who shares his commitment to the cause, he sets up a bare bones office and begins visiting inmates on death row.

It’s here where he meets Walter “Johnny D.” McMillian ( Jamie Foxx ), a poor black man who was arrested and convicted of killing a white woman on no evidence and extremely suspect testimony. Johnny D is all but resigned to his cruel and unjust fate when he first encounters Stevenson. He’s been failed by every element of the legal process in every possible way and has no cause to believe things will change. But the compassionate and idealistic young lawyer convinces McMillian and his family to fight the sentence.

Function Over Form:  There’s nothing about  Just Mercy  that challenges or pushes the boundaries of filmmaking. It doesn’t do much to innovate the structure of the Big Issue film, either. If you’ve seen at least one Hollywood feature that earnestly tackles a serious topic for a mixture of pathos and awareness, you probably know exactly where this is going. Injustice occurs. An underdog fights against it, usually at some expense to themselves. Impassioned speeches are made. A vital battle is won, but the war continues.

Yet just because Just Mercy follows this storytelling formula to a large extent, doesn’t mean it isn’t good. After all, sometimes it’s not about how a story is told, but who gets to have their stories told. Racism, the structural inequality of the incarceration system, and the inhumanity of the death penalty are issues that have all been tackled in movies before, from To Kill A Mockingbird to The Green Mile , but rarely if ever with the frankness and immediacy that Just Mercy brings to McMillian and Stevenson’s journeys.

All of this is not lost on director Destin Daniel Cretton , who’s rather self-aware about this context in the screenplay he co-wrote with Andrew Lanham. For instance, when Stevenson first begins working in Monroe County, seemingly everyone he tries to engage with asks him if he’s been to the To Kill a Mockingbird museum yet. It works both as a cheeky, running joke and a reminder of the disparity between Harper Lee’s fiction and Stevenson’s reality. Or better yet, the difference between the 1962 film adaptation and Just Mercy .

Bottom line: The system is broken. The people perpetuating it are racist, ignorant, and complacent. It’s victimized McMillian and both hampers and targets Stevenson as he attempts to combat it. Death row is monstrous and viciously unfair to all of its prisoners — not just the innocent ones. The film may take us on a familiar path toward a cathartic climax and teachable moments over the course of its 136 minutes, but it spares us and its characters any scenes of feigned surprise or overly voyeuristic suffering about any of these facts along the way.

That’s a good thing.

Character Evidence:  The message of  Just Mercy is also buoyed by a number of strong performances from its exemplary cast. Larson is solid but not exactly showy in her supporting ally role. Jordan isn’t necessarily given a lot to chew on as Stevenson, a role that focuses more on his work and valor than any personal details, but he plays the pure hero well.

Rob Morgan , who stars as Herbert Richardson, another client of Stevenson’s, is subtly striking but restrained. Playing a veteran with PTSD and noticeable ticks could have easily devolved into hamminess, but Morgan never lets his portrayal obscure Richardson’s humanity. He’ both heartfelt and heartbreaking in the role.

But the film really belongs to Jamie Foxx , who runs the gamut of human emotion as McMillian. Beaten by life but not entirely broken, imperfect but innocent, Foxx is compassionate, wry, and thoughtful in one of the best performances of his career. Even if, for whatever reason, you’re not invested in his plight on an idealogical level, you can invest in him on a personal one.

The Verdict: It might not be the purest or boldest aesthetic expression in the history of cinema, but Just Mercy is incredibly effective at what it sets out to do: change hearts and minds about capital punishment, bring more awareness to the brutality of killing other human beings in the name of the law, and highlight the racism and other issues of structural inequality that lead to the high margin of error in death penalty convictions. What’s more, it celebrates some real-life heroes who have made — and are still making — a difference in this issue along the way. It might not be to everyone’s taste, or everyone’s politics, but this flawed albeit powerful film is worthy of your time and consideration.

Where’s It Playing? Court adjourns on Christmas Day.

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Just Mercy (2020) – Film Review

Alongside The Stand by Stephen King, To Kill A Mockingbird is my favourite book. It remains the only novel I’ve thrown across the room in disgust and maintains a special place in my heart as the story that got me interested in writing, if only to try and capture that same raw emotion I felt thanks to Harper Lee. In a way, Just Mercy feels like a modern tribute to that book, with plenty of un-subtle hints and similarities in terms of structure and racist themes. In its enthusiastic emulation, Just Mercy plays off a little too formulaic at times, despite a very important and poignant tone running through most of the 2 hour run-time.

The story begins with an introduction to our two key characters, civil rights defense attorney Bryan Stevenson and death row prisoner Walter McMillian. From here, the plot skips forward two years where we see Bryan working as a lawyer for inmates on death row, much to the disdain of the Alabaman authorities. Plunging head-first into the lion’s den, Bryan finds himself struggling to make sense of a case strung together with a thin shred of evidence and a system seemingly rigged from the top down. As the film progresses, Bryan takes on Walter’s case and fights for justice, building up to a climactic court case where he fights to free this wrongly convicted inmate.

At times, Just Mercy does play out a little slow-paced but to be honest, it works pretty well given the context of the film. This methodically paced drama takes it times to introduce the main players, the community and all the intricate elements of this case that work together to produce a powerful finale. If I’m honest, the dramatic court-room segments actually feel too quick-paced, arriving 90 minutes into the film and subsequently feeling a little too lackadaisical and lacking the same intensity something like To Kill A Mockingbird manages to achieve. 

Despite the gripes, it’s ultimately the characters that keep this one so engaging. With plenty of close-up shots and lingering glances, Jamie Foxx and Michael B. Jordan do a wonderful job here while Tim Blake Nelson portrays the skittish Ralph Myers perfectly. If there’s one weak link though it’s Brie Larson. Although she’s not given a lot to work with her range is limited, to say the least, and this film does her no favours next to the other actors.

Ultimately it’s the themes that make this such a powerful film and ironically it’s something that’s a bit of a double-edged sword. Just Mercy isn’t exactly subtle in its admiration for To Kill A Mockingbird, taking the time to show framed pictures of mockingbirds, lingering on a sign welcoming visitors with a Mockingbird sign and even seeing characters mention the civil rights museum. I know these are supposed to feel bitterly ironic segments to get you thinking about inequality and racism but for me, it felt a little too on-the-nose, with a more subtle tone may have served the film better.

Overall though Just Mercy is well worth a watch. It’s not a particularly fast-paced or exciting film but it is a very important one, commanding the screen thanks to some powerful performances and some poignant, topical themes at its core. If you’re in the mood for a decent legal drama and are happy to persevere through the slow pace, Just Mercy rewards your patience with an engaging true-story picture.

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• Verdict - 7/10 7/10

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