Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: Jamie Foxx, Michael B. Jordan, Rob Morgan, O’ Shea Jackson Jr., Brie Larson, Rafe Spall, Tim Blake Nelson, Greta Green, Michael Harding, J. Alphonse Nicholson, Jacinte Blankenship.
You can throw all the money in the world at a film and it can still fail, possibly not in box offices returns, but in terms of the message that it’s director, its writer and cast wish to deliver to the audience. What it may have in on screen content abundance, does not always mean it has character woven through it, that it may have personality, but it is sure to be missing integrity, absent of honour.
It is therefore refreshing to find such honour in the film Just Mercy, a film that deals with the intolerable act of racism and the value that the United States of America takes stock in the death penalty.
In a period of time where citizens of the United States are waking up to the fact that their so called protectors of law and order are facing the backlash of their actions towards the black community, for the lies and ineptitude, their flagrant attitude towards race and truth, Just Mercy is one of the most powerful reminders that the stance against injustice, against the idea of the death penalty being used, especially when the evidence is either vapour thin or has been adjusted to show a more favourable sentence being passed against the suspected offender and must be stopped completely as an act of deterrent in a civilised world.
Just Mercy is the true story of Bryan Stevenson and his pursuit for justice for those who find themselves placed into a line where the only sense of time is waiting for the day when they get informed that they will be facing death at the hands of a biased system.
It is one man’s story in amongst a million which makes this aspiring, and inspiring American lawyer take up the challenge of digging out the truth of his conviction, and for Walter McMillian, played with unbelievable truth and honesty by Jamie Foxx, it is a moment in which the system came crashing down, and was proved to be corrupt in the face of his innocence.
To have character is essential in film, in life, to walk the walk perhaps, without it you are just performing for the camera, you are offering nothing to the debate, and there has never been a time when such a debate is needed in the United States about race and the abuse of law from the ground up.
Alongside Jamie Foxx, Michael B. Jordan gives perhaps the performance of his life as Bryan Stevenson, unflappable, again full of integrity and passion, and Rob Morgan who gives a startling exhibition of Herbert Richardson, a Vietnam veteran with PTSD who finds himself on the wrong end of a verdict, death taking him violently when what he really required was hospital treatment.
If you want glamour then almost any other film this year will catch your eye, if you want entertainment then this is not the film for you, but should you want to see justice done, of you want the promise of integrity to be held up like a beacon in a world of darkness, then Just Mercy is arguably the film of 2020. Outstanding!
Ian D. Hall