JUST MERCY (12A) ***

Director: Destin Daniel Cretton

Stars: Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx, Brie Larson

Runtime: 137 minutes

You know you’re at the thin end of awards season when movies get released that seem to exist as much for their weighty and worthy subject matter – and therefore their appeal to voters – as for their actual content.

So it is with Just Mercy, a well-meaning, solidly made drama based on real events, that offers a valuable portrait of an important man, but is never quite able to overcome its bland storytelling. Set in the 1990s, it begins as lumberjack Walter McMillian (Foxx) is arrested for murder in Alabama. Despite evidence against him being very limited, mostly just the word of another convict, he is convicted and receives the death penalty.

Meanwhile, newly qualified lawyer Bryan Stevenson (Jordan) spends his time trying to help death row inmates, almost all of them black. He must deal with racist officials and encounter obstructions at every turn in the sorts of scenes of authority figures abusing people of colour that we’ve seen in the past, though they’re no less troubling for it. Prepare yourself too for the research and looking-through-files episodes that we’ve seen in every law-oriented film ever, as Bryan meets Walter and looks into his case to prove his innocence.

As a howl of rage against a shameful system,

Just Mercy of course has value, but it’s presented in a way that is unfortunately clunky, where everything is explained to within an inch of its life.

Yet still it can be powerful in several moments, with occasional bursts of tension in the courtroom, and once we get up to speed it’s a solid procedural that gets by as much on outrage as on narrative strength within the writing.

The actors are all very capable, although Brie Larson gets dumped with a pointless and thankless role as a legal colleague of Bryan’s, and you have to assume she’s appearing because she was in director Cretton’s previous two films.

Foxx plays to the galleries a little, but it’s Bryan’s story, and Jordan takes him from naive to strong with skill. Thank goodness for Stevenson then, but not necessarily for films like this.