movie review of just mercy

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 .

• 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
• Andrew Lanham
• Destin Daniel Cretton

Cinematographer

• Brett Pawlak

Writer (based on the book by)

• Bryan Stevenson
• Joel P. West
• Nat Sanders

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'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: 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’: 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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Review: ‘Just Mercy’ shines brightest when painful truths are exposed

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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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Just Mercy Reviews

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 24, 2022

There can't be any doubt about the sincerity of Just Mercy, though it did not need to exceed two hours' running time to establish these points.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 23, 2022

The movie doesn’t feel particularly fresh or new, but it’s unwavering in its honesty and dedication to its characters...

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 22, 2022

This is still an important story to tell, and if the film doesn’t do anything interesting or exciting with the material, it is still solid and ends on a high note. It works, and there’s nothing more it needs to do than that.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | May 13, 2022

Although Just Mercy is a little long at more than two hours it may have been better told as a miniseries and takes a while to get going, its worth persevering with for the heartfelt portrayal of this remarkable man.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 21, 2022

Just Mercy is a great companion to the ongoing discussion regarding the death penalty, bringing a relevant and integral view to the topic.

Full Review | Feb 12, 2022

Jamie Foxx - stellar turn in his performance.

Full Review | Sep 15, 2021

Just Mercy is one of those films that reminds us why some movies are more than just vehicles for financial gain.

Full Review | Aug 12, 2021

Just Mercy easily solidifies its main point about a system that fails to protect the innocent.

Full Review | Jul 23, 2021

...what's left is a fine, crowd-pleasing piece of cinema made from masterpiece-worthy source material. It's capable of being far greater than this...

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 22, 2021

Michael B. Jordan's stirring legal drama packs a powerful, emotional punch...

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 9, 2021

Just Mercy is another great showcase for Jordan, Larson, Foxx, and Cretton, and a reminder that advocates like Stevenson are needed to ensure our justice system remains fair for everyone.

Full Review | Feb 17, 2021

A graceful, sharp and impeccably acted film that packs an emotional punch in the quietest and most profound ways possible.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Feb 11, 2021

Filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton has infused Just Mercy with a matter-of-fact sensibility that suits his and Andrew Lanham's familiar screenplay quite well.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 11, 2021

The film shows us how the legal system can be manipulated by the rich and privileged across the globe. Although Just Mercy takes its time to get there, the conclusion is unquestionably impactful.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 11, 2021

Just Mercy isn't a groundbreaking film, but it's an optimistic one. If you need a little hope and emotional release these days, this movie will give you some.

Full Review | Feb 11, 2021

Foxx does his best work in a decade. For the charismatic Jordan, who puts in a tone-setting nuanced turn here, Just Mercy arrives between Creed II and Tom Clancy's Without Remorse. Let's hope he sticks with the "one for them, one for me" formula.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 11, 2021

"Just Mercy" is solid, meat-and-potatoes docudrama filmmaking, if you don't mind a first-rate story of systemic injustice undercut by second-rate dialogue.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 11, 2021

Unlike many movies "based on a true story," "Just Mercy" sticks close to the facts of the case - for the simple reason that the facts are drama enough.

It's both rage-inducing and awe-inspiring; the courage conveyed by the protagonists is a balm on the sting of injustice.

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Just Mercy Is a Precise and Patient Recounting of a Very Real Human Story

It seems unfair to say that the outcome of Just Mercy feels like a foregone conclusion, because in truth the film tells a remarkable story. Sometime in the 1980s, a fresh-faced Harvard Law School graduate named Bryan Stevenson (played by Michael B. Jordan in the movie) arrived in Alabama determined to provide legal counsel to prisoners on Death Row, many of whom had never had proper legal representation. He took on the case of Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx), also known as Johnnie D, a Monroeville pulpwood worker who had been convicted, under exceedingly dubious circumstances, of the grisly murder of a teenage dry cleaner clerk and then sent to Death Row despite the fact that his jury had imposed life imprisonment. The appeals process took years, and at one point Stevenson had to resort to a 60 Minutes segment to attract outside attention to the case.

Destin Daniel Cretton’s film is based on the non-fiction book called Just Mercy , by the real-life Bryan Stevenson, and at times it feels like the work of a compassionate advocate rather than a dramatist, but that’s not always a bad thing, at least in this case. One could easily see something far more sensationalistic being made from this material — the violence brought center-stage, the outrages pushed to roaring extremes, the many potential urgent twists and turns of a legal case with an execution looming made extra-twisty, extra-turn-y, extra-urgent. I don’t know what liberties Cretton and his co-writer Andrew Lanham have taken, but their treatment feels honest and sober, a precise and patient accounting rather than a righteous protest.

That’s not to say that the film is dry and passionless. Rather, it gives its actors space to find their characters within the relevant story (as opposed to finding it within extraneous narrative elements, like romantic entanglements or other subplots): In Bryan’s first interactions with Johnnie D, you can feel Jordan’s anxious, awkward energy clashing with Foxx’s laconic exhaustion, and you understand the insurmountable nature of the task at hand, as each man seems lost in his own form of frustration. Foxx’s Johnnie D, already a broken man by the time Bryan meets him, has made a kind of corrosive peace with Death Row; he bonds with the men in the neighboring cells, who are all aware that they will share the same fate, and who have shut themselves off from any thoughts of freedom. One of the men, Herb Richardson (Rob Morgan), doesn’t even pretend to innocence; he freely admits to the murder he’s been convicted of, though it’s also clear, through his halting, strained speech, that the post-traumatic stress he endured in Vietnam has played a part in destroying his mind.

Just Mercy has its share of conveniences and blind spots. Brie Larson plays Eva Ansley, Bryan’s partner in a grass-roots organization called the Equal Justice Initiative, and while Ansley was a key figure in the real-life case, having a movie star play her, only to then sideline the character, feels like a Hollywood distraction. Still, these are mostly minor missteps. Not unlike Todd Haynes’s recent Dark Waters , Just Mercy doesn’t mess too much with a familiar template, opting instead to focus on the very real human story at its center as a way of revitalizing the socially conscious legal drama.

Maybe that’s because, for all their predictability, such stories retain their power. (In fact, maybe they retain their power because of their predictability.) While Johnnie D wastes away in prison, Bryan attempts to track down the details of the original case, sparse as they were, while also dealing with the racism of this community. He’s stopped and intimidated by the cops, humiliated by prison guards, treated dismissively wherever he goes. None of these are moves new to tales of injustice in the South; they’re practically requirements by this point. But Jordan has a great face for doubt and inner conflict. There’s a quizzical, nervous quality to him — which is also why when he does action movies, he’s so wonderfully unpredictable — and you can sense his devotion to justice clashing with his genuine fear. Part of the story here lies in Bryan’s gradual awakening to the fact that the problems he seeks to solve are ultimately not about individual cases or glitches in a noble process, but about a pervasive climate of fear and inequality born of centuries of repression. Just Mercy doesn’t try to hammer that point home, but rather allows the viewer to absorb the message through the humanity of the story and the performances.

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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 is a powerful argument against the death penalty

The film — based on Bryan Stevenson’s book and starring Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx — is flawed but vital.

by Alissa Wilkinson

The American practice of capital punishment is inextricably linked to much of what’s wrong with our justice system — its focus on punitive rather than restorative measures; its indisputable bias against the poor, mentally ill, and marginalized; its captivity to racial bias . These issues aren’t up for much debate.

But despite support for abolishing or at least reforming the death penalty from both progressives and a healthy number of pro-life conservatives , it’s also not something most Americans have to think about a lot. Few people find their own lives touched by the death penalty, and it’s in the best interests of its supporters not to say much about the details in public.

Since 1976, for every nine Americans executed by the state, one is exonerated and released from death row — a margin of error that should terrify us all. (And yet, after years of decline, American support for the death penalty ticked up in 2018.)

That’s precisely what Just Mercy , a true story that will set your sense of injustice ablaze, aims to change.

Just Mercy is a story of idealism that becomes tempered by reality and sharpened by injustice

Based on Bryan Stevenson ’s bestselling 2014 memoir of the same name, Just Mercy tells the story of Stevenson’s early career as an attorney working to reverse wrongful convictions in Alabama and details the founding of his organization, the Equal Justice Initiative . The film focuses on the case of Walter “Johnny D” McMillian, a poor black man who was arrested in 1987 for the murder of an 18-year-old white girl and convicted based on testimony that later turned out to be fabricated. After years of legal battles, McMillian’s story became a national case, and his convictions were at last reversed in 1993.

It is a plainly infuriating story, and Just Mercy doesn’t try to disguise its most angering aspects: the racism and bias against the poor that led to McMillian’s conviction; the twisting of the pursuit of justice into the pursuit of reputation; the ways the powerful protect their own.

And the film is smartly designed to deliver its message into as many hearts as possible. Directed and co-written by Destin Daniel Cretton ( Short Term 12 , The Glass Castle , and Marvel’s upcoming Eternals ), Just Mercy stars a bevy of actors who get audiences in the door, led by Michael B. Jordan, Jamie Foxx, and Brie Larson. Foxx’s performance, in particular, seems like a solid bet for an Oscar nod.

Jordan plays Stevenson, a recent Harvard Law graduate raised in Delaware who feels compelled, after completing an internship in Alabama during law school, to take the state’s bar and move south to work with death row inmates. His mother is angry at him — she’s afraid of what will happen to a black man in the deep south who dares to take on that task — but he’s full of ideals and undeterred. (He’s also driven by his faith, something the film conveys mostly through visual cues, such as when he prays with inmates, but was a big part of Stevenson’s real-life motivation .)

Stevenson arrives in Monroeville, Alabama — the county where Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird , many residents, including the white district attorney, proudly inform him. People keep telling him to go to “the Mockingbird museum”; it’s “one of the most significant civil rights landmarks in the south,” the DA says.

But what Stevenson finds in Monroeville is a death row full of inmates who seem to have ended up there for reasons that are less than just. Even Herbert Richardson (Rob Morgan) — who confesses immediately to Stevenson that he did what he’s been convicted of doing — is obviously mentally ill, suffering from PTSD following a harrowing tour of duty in Vietnam.

In reviewing his new case load along with local advocate Eva Ansley (Larson), Stevenson realizes that the conviction of one inmate in particular, McMillian (Foxx), is almost certainly wrong. The further he digs into the case, the more he realizes that it’s linked to some of Monroeville’s ugliest attitudes and secrets. The entire case against McMillian is based on testimony from a convicted murderer (Tim Blake Nelson) who was offered a plea deal in exchange for fingering McMillian.

Stevenson and Ansley know the whole thing stinks. But their quest to reverse McMillian and others’ convictions fly right in the face of the powerful, and Stevenson’s experiences with McMillian begin to change the shape of his own idealism.

Just Mercy has some key storytelling flaws, but is still worth watching

Just Mercy ’s greatest strength as a film is its true story, and Cretton chooses to keep the focus on the plot. The movie is structured like a straight-ahead procedural, with all the usual beats. It’s more workmanlike than imaginatively scripted or shot, which is a little disappointing — there was certainly an opportunity to set the film apart from other procedural films or movies about death row, but this one sticks to familiar vocabulary.

And in following that template, it also falls into a distressing rut. McMillian, after all, was innocent. And it’s easy to get indignant on behalf of the wrongfully convicted.

But by dint of McMillian’s story being the easiest sell to the audience, someone like Richardson — who did in fact commit the crime — ends up as a side story, albeit one that’s powerfully told and embodied by Morgan. As the Equal Justice Initiative’s website argues , the death penalty is rooted in the practice of lynching, and there are myriad arguments, both practical and philosophical, for why people who are not innocent still ought not to be executed by the state.

Still, the film’s point comes across by the end: Not only is capital punishment barbaric, but the system that orchestrates it is grossly flawed. Several time, the film illustrates how the threat of the electric chair is used to coerce and intimidate people who have not even been convicted (McMillian was put on death row a year before his trial). Fear, as a tool wielded by those who enforce and enact the law, should have no place in the pursuit of justice and the protection of innocence. But it does, all the same.

And that should matter to everyone who cares about a just society. Not every American will know someone personally touched by the death penalty. But shifting how we think about capital punishment will shift the way we think about what the justice system is for. (We are, after all, governed by a president who brashly, publicly called for the execution of five teenagers in 1989 , and refuses to recant even after their exoneration, saying their coerced testimonies should still be taken as fact — a rhetorical move that will seem familiar after you see Just Mercy .)

In spite of its shortcomings, Just Mercy is still the sort of film that’s worth watching and absorbing and discussing, because the story it tells has not stopped being relevant in the decades since Stevenson and McMillian met. America’s history of injustice has not gotten less dark in recent years. And we cannot willfully blind ourselves when our brothers’ and sisters’ blood continues to cry out from the ground .

Just Mercy premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. It opens in theaters on Christmas Day.

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‘Just Mercy’: A Real-Life Legal Drama About an American Hero

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Just Mercy isn’t what you would call groundbreaking — you’ve seen this kind of legal drama before, many times over. But the hard truths about racial injustice in its fact-based storytelling come through loud and clear, thanks to stellar performances from Michael B. Jordan and Jamie Foxx .

Jordan plays Bryan Stevenson, a young man fresh out of Harvard law who, in 1989, decides to start an Equal Justice Initiative in Monroe County, Alabama, to take on the lost-cause cases of inmates on death row. Such a client is Walter McMillian (Foxx), a.k.a. Johnny D, a small-town lumber-company owner who is framed for the murder of a teenage white girl. As a result of deep-grained racism and two ineffective previous attorneys, McMillan is reluctant to accept Stevenson’s no-fee offer to have another crack at his case. In the compelling true-life legal drama that director Destin Daniel Cretton ( Short Term 12, The Glass Castle ) and co-writer Andrew Lanham have adapted from Stevenson’s 2014 memoir, it’s lost on no one that the crying need to fight for civil rights hasn’t diminished in the three decades that Stevenson’s organization has successfully challenged the death row convictions of more than 125 inmates. No wonder that Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called Stevenson “America’s Mandela.”

Jordan pours his heart and soul into the role of the crusading attorney. And Foxx, deservedly nominated as Best Supporting Actor by the Screen Actors Guild, exudes ferocity and buried feeling as a man who is close to giving up hope. Here in Alabama, he tells Stevenson, “you’re guilty from the moment you’re born.” It fits McMillan’s words that the film’s soundtrack includes the slave song “No More Auction Block” and that black men were sold near the courthouse where his case is being tried. It’s hard to miss the irony that the citizens of Monroe Country point with pride to resident Harper Lee, whose prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird, indicts the very injustice being inflicted on McMillan.

Commendably, Just Mercy does very little to gild the lily. Cretton plays by the rules of a strict, legal procedural, which sometimes flattens the drama inherent in the corruption of the judicial process. It’s the actors who make this real-life legal procedural come alive. They include Oscar winner Brie Larson , a Cretton regular, as Eva Ansley, a local advocate who allows Stevenson to use her home as the official center for his Initiative when the community closes its doors and issues threats to the safety of Ansley and her family. And to avoid portraying Stevenson as a miracle worker, we see him take on clients he can’t save, such as Herb Richardson (a superb Rob Morgan), a war vet with PTSD who is guilty of setting off a bomb that killed a woman. Stevenson’s pleas for Richardson and against capital punishment can’t stop Richardson’s walk to the electric chair.

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And the film painstakingly recreates the obstacles Stevenson faces. They include corrupt district attorney Tommy Chapman (Rafe Spall) and  key witness Ralph Myers (Tim Blake Nelson), the convicted felon whose testimony against McMillian was most likely coerced by police. The reliably fine Nelson brings traces of humanity to the role of a twisted bigot.

The heart of of the movie stays focused on McMillan and his family, with his wife (Karen Kendrick) presenting a picture of her husband as a flawed man who is nonetheless incapable of the crime for which he stands accused. Foxx’s nuanced, finely-calibrated acting allows us to see McMillan as a casualty of a system that tries to paint over the rot that’s festering inside. The court fight that ends the film — with Stevenson putting racism itself on trial — points to a small victory among many defeats. Society remains unexonerated. The real battle is still to be won. That’s the power of Just Mercy. It demands that you bear witness.

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Just mercy review: michael b. jordan fights for justice.

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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 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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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.

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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 .

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• 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

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• What Is Cinema?

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

Chief critic.

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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.

Just Mercy (2019)

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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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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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• DVD & Streaming

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In Theaters

• December 25, 2019
• Michael B. Jordan as Bryan Stevenson; Brie Larson as Eva Ansley; Jamie Foxx as Walter “Johnny D” McMillian; Rafe Spall as Tommy Champan; Rob Morgan as Herbert Richardson; O'Shea Jackson Jr. as Anthony Ray Hinton; Tim Blake Nelson as Ralph Myers; Karan Kendrick as Minnie McMillian; Michael Harding as Sheriff Tate

Home Release Date

• March 27, 2020
• Destin Daniel Cretton

Distributor

• Warner Bros.

Movie Review

Deep in Alabama, just a 90-minute drive north from Mobile, you’ll find the small town of Monroeville, home of To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee.

The folks of Monroeville, circa 1991, are proud of their literary heritage. Ask anyone, and they’ll point you to the To Kill a Mockingbird museum down the way. Or to the courthouse, where Lee had Atticus Finch make his fabled defense of a black man falsely accused of rape. It’s a civil rights landmark, they’ll tell you.

Perhaps a few—too few—would see a sad irony, too.

Walter McMillian, better known as Johnny D, is on death row. The black man was convicted of killing a white woman named Ronda Morrison: Prosecutors said that he walked into a laundromat on Nov. 1, 1986, and shot her several times in the back. In a trial that took just a day and a half, he was tried and convicted by an almost all-white jury, which recommended life in prison. Not harsh enough , the judge decided, and slapped Johnny D with the death penalty.

Never mind that the crime’s main witness was a convicted felon himself who had plenty of reason to frame McMillian. Never mind the lack of motive or physical evidence. Never mind that a score of witnesses said he was at a fish fry when the crime took place. (The fact that those witnesses were black, apparently, made their testimony unwanted.)

Enter Bryan Stevenson, a graduate of Harvard Law School who rejected a position at a posh law firm to head a non-profit legal team called the Equal Justice Initiative—an organization that gives convicted felons (particularly those on death row) the sort of legal help that might’ve escaped them the first time around. He looks into McMillian’s case and finds all sorts of inconsistencies—so many, in fact, that he wonders whether anyone read the evidence at all. If anyone deserves a second chance at justice, it’s McMillian.

But Monroeville’s power brokers don’t want to hear it. They got their man, never mind the evidence. They knew McMillian was guilty just by looking at him. And if Ronda Morrison’s spirit doesn’t rest easy, her parents sure do.

Maybe if Stevenson had looked more like Atticus Finch—a white man born and bred in the south, a man who knew everyone from the mayor and sheriff to the lady serving coffee at the corner diner—Monroeville’s power brokers might’ve listened to him.

But Stevenson’s a Delaware-born, East-coast educated black man. And Sheriff Tate and D.A. Tommy Champan don’t take kindly to carpet-bagging northerners telling them how to run their town.

Positive Elements

Bryan Stevenson, in this movie at least, looks like a candidate for sainthood. We hear hints of his childhood, how he grew up poor, in a neighborhood not so different from McMillian’s own; and we see how his desire to help people on death row first germinated. When he leaves for Alabama, Bryan tells his nervous mother that she “always taught me to fight for the people need it the most.”

Outside these brief early snippets, though, we don’t see much of the guy’s personal life. And no wonder, given his single-minded dedication to his work and the clients he defends. He stays up all night working, pushes tirelessly against unfair barriers and even risks his life. And those who work with Bryan sometimes risk theirs, too.

Eva Ansley, who works closely with Bryan, notes that unlike most lawyers, Bryan gets close to his clients—so much so that they become nearly family to him. And when one of those clients is sent to the electric chair in spite of Bryan’s help, the condemned man thinks so highly of Bryan that he has the Army (from which he was honorably discharged) send the flag he earned to the lawyer.

While “Johnny D” McMillian is no saint (as we’ll see), he becomes a strong, faithful friend to many fellow death-row prisoners. When one suffers a panic attack after getting an execution date, Johnny D walks him through calming breathing and visualization exercises. “Whatever you did,” Johnny tells the man, “Your life is still meaningful.” And when that man is led to the execution chamber, Johnny D leads a noisy salute to the condemned. He’s deeply saddened by how he hurt his family, too, and wants to do whatever he can to make amends. And sometimes, when the case against him seems to hit a wall, Johnny D encourages Bryan, rather than the other way around.

Spiritual Elements

While Just Mercy isn’t technically a Christian movie, faith’s fingerprints are everywhere here.

Bryan, it’s suggested, is a Christian: He bonds with a death-row inmate over how both of them grew up in church. (Bryan played the piano there, while the convict sang in the church choir.) And when the guard roughs up the convict and forces him out of the room, the prisoner begins to sing an old hymn with a smile. Later, Bryan participates in a worship ceremony at a Monroeville church—watching and singing along as fellow congregants enthusiastically praise God.

A convict is led to the electric chair as the gospel song “Old Rugged Cross” plays in the background. The movie seems to suggest thin parallels between the man’s execution and Jesus’ own unjustified death: The condemned man looks compassionately at one of the jail guards fastening his leg to the chair, and when he asks whether he has any last words to give, he simply says that he harbors “no ill will” to anyone. The man’s gentleness, combined with the horrific way he dies, deeply impacts the guard—much as Jesus’ own forgiveness from the cross is sometimes shown to impact the Roman soldiers who took part in the execution.

As mentioned, Johnny D was actually attending a fish fry during the murder he was accused of committing—a fundraiser, we’re told, for the church he attended. The spiritual “Lay Down My Life for the Lord” plays as the credits roll. We see plenty of churches and crosses in the background of various scenes.

Sexual & romantic Content

Before being accused of murder, Johnny D was caught fooling around with a white woman—an act of infidelity that made him a target, he and his family believe. As soon as Johnny D’s dalliances became widely known, unfounded stories about him quickly began to circulate: Soon people were saying that he was a drug dealer, too, and then a leader of the Dixie mafia.

A guard forces Bryan to strip before entering a prison (which I’ll say more about in Other Negative Content).

A couple of women stare at Bryan as he works, with one telling the other that he’s a good-looking single guy. The other woman corrects her, telling her that Bryan’s “married—to his work.”

Violent Content

Bryan and his work partner, Eva, engender some ill will around town. One disgruntled Alabaman calls Eva at home, telling her he’s put a bomb in her house. After she, her family and Bryan evacuate, police don’t find anything, but Eva is understandably shaken. “Maybe people will stop trying to kill us when they realize how charming we are,” she jokes grimly.

Bryan, meanwhile, is harassed by police: He’s stopped on the road for no apparent reason; and, when he asks why he’s been pulled over, one of the arresting officers pulls his gun and screams for Bryan to get out of the car. The officer shoves the lawyer against the hood and pushes the barrel of the gun into his neck. Eventually, after several tense moments, the officers allow Bryan to leave without offering a word of explanation. It’s not the only time we see police manhandling or mistreating people in their custody.

A man is executed. Though we don’t see the man die, we watch witnesses to the execution as they watch, absorbing the horror they feel. Another convict says he was on death row during another execution, with his room being the closest to the “kill room.” He says he could smell and even taste the flesh of his old friend in the air.

After a disappointing court date, Johnny D resists being put back in his cell: Guards are forced to shove him in and restrain him. We hear about the alleged crimes of death row inmates—particularly that of a man who killed a woman by placing a bomb on her front porch. The man—a Vietnam vet who struggles mightily with post-traumatic stress disorder—struggles to understand why he’d even do such a thing. Another convict has disfiguring scars, apparently the result of a fiery accident he had when he was 7 years old.

Though the story centers around Ronda Morrison’s murder—a “terrible” and “horrific” crime, we’re told—the film steers clear of unpacking the details of her murder. We occasionally see a static photo of Ronda when she was still alive.

Crude or Profane Language

We hear about 15 s-words. We also hear at least one f-word, though perhaps the hints of a few others can be heard in the background. Characters also say “a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n,” “h—” and the n-word. God’s name is misused twice, once paired with “d–n.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

Eva and her husband drink beer over dinner, as Bryan sips a glass of water. One or two characters smoke cigarettes.

Other noteworthy Elements

A prison guard forces Bryan to strip before entering a prison—even though the law explicitly states that lawyers don’t have to do so before talking with prospective clients. Bryan takes off his shirt, pants and finally (off-camera) his boxers. The guard then increases Bryan’s humiliation by telling the lawyer to “bend over and spread.” The horrified Bryan waits a beat before the guard smirks and tells Bryan he can get dressed again. The guard’s actions clearly communicate his desire to humiliate Bryan and to demonstrate his perceived power over the lawyer.

We see plenty of racism, both overt and covert, in Just Mercy —suggesting that prejudice is alive and well in this corner of Alabama in the early 1990s. In addition, police—especially Sheriff Tate—lie and coerce witnesses in order to push McMillian into the electric chair. Just Mercy suggests that Monroeville’s District Attorney, Tommy Champan, is a man who should know better—but for most of the movie blithely and bitterly defends McMillian’s conviction.

Just Mercy is based on a book of the same name written by the real Bryan Stevenson—a legal advocate who’s spent the better part of three decades crusading for the rights and better legal representation for those convicted of crimes in the South, especially those on death row.

Some might be inclined, I suppose, to see a political bent in Stevenson’s work. And some might be discomfited by the movie’s depiction of southern Alabama in the not-so-distant past. I have relatives who live in Alabama, and I’d like to think that some progress—difficult and halting progress, perhaps, but progress nevertheless—has been made since then.

But if history teaches us anything, evil—and no doubt, racism is one of the planet’s most pernicious evils—does not disappear naturally with time. It takes work and courage and risk and pain to address it. Oh, and faith, too.

Just Mercy is a beautiful example of the work, the courage and the faith it takes to push against the wrongs of this world: faith that a broken system can still be repaired enough to yield a semblance of justice. Faith that good people can stand up for a good reason. Faith in God, too, whose presence we subtly feel throughout the film.

Theaters are filled with secular movies that are either indifferent or outright hostile to faith, with only the occasional small, overtly Christian faith-based flick offering counterprogramming. Just Mercy finds the middle ground, showing how faith can inspire and motivate believers in the real world.

The movie is not without some issues, of course, as we’ve already detailed. But those are relatively minor in relation to its redemptive payoff. Anchored by the strong performances of Michael B. Jordan (Bryan) and Jamie Foxx (Johnny D), Just Mercy is an inspirational, educational and well-acted portrait of the pursuit of true justice.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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