Just Mercy

Sober death-row drama set in Alabama Dir: Destin Daniel Cretton 2hrs 17mins (12A)

Adapted from the memoir of the civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy is a death row drama about the case of a black tree feller from Alabama who, in 1987, was convicted of the murder of a white teenager on the basis of fabricated evidence. Director Destin Daniel Cretton has produced a “refined, sober” film that never resorts to “flashy melodrama”, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. Rather, it pauses to observe “the entire landscape of systemic racism and corruption”.

Jamie Foxx as the wrongly convicted man, and Michael B. Jordan as Stevenson, the young lawyer fighting to prove his innocence, give “dialled-down” performances that pay dividends by “lending greater weight to those moments (a courtroom showdown, a jailhouse breakout) when Cretton “turns up the dramatic heat”, said Mark Kermode in The Observer. The film’s absence from the Oscar nominations is “further evidence that #OscarsSoWhite still applies”.

Jordan and Foxx deserve every plaudit, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph, but it’s a pity the film itself is so “lethargic”. It could have been a “crackling yarn”, a real-life John Grisham thriller with the “racial indignation dialled up”. Instead it is “thuddingly honourable”, with a “dawdling” gospel-inflected score and a narrative that somehow misses “the urgency of this life-or-death fight”.