The good guys and bad guys are clearly delineated without a lot of nuance.
It's a nice movie made by nice people will good intentions about a subject matter that is definitely worthy of elevating: exonerating wrongfully convicted black men on death row.
And the true story on which this movie is based is an outrageous, shocking one. An Alabama man nicknamed Johhny D (played soulfully by Jamie Foxx, in a performance that should have drawn Oscar attention0 is sentenced to death in the murder of a teenage white girl with virtually no evidence, based on coerced testimony, and the prosecutors willingness to ignore any and all information that clearly exonerated him.
An earnest young Harvard graduate attorney (played here by a somewhat neutered Michael B. Jordan) comes to his defense, and the rest is well, history. Johnny D's plight is incredibly sympathetic and easy to invest in, but the movie is shot and scripted in such a generic, by the numbers fashion that it lacks the kind of urgency it should have had.
Still, when the film reaches its conclusion -- and details the shocking fate of the real life characters on death row that movie has portrayed -- it's hard to deny the movie's power and worthiness.
Fortunately, it has an ace up its sleeve with a revitalized Jamie Foxx. Foxx is one of those actors who seems like he should be getting consistently great leading roles to play but whose career has unfortunately been a bit hit or miss. He's not starred in any outright disasters that I can think of, but I think he is simply underutilized as a performer.
Here he is incredibly effective, I think in part because he usually excels at playing confident, self possessed men and here he is playing that kind of person only with their freedom unjustly stripped away from them. His anger and pain is palpable in every scene he's in and I kept wanting more of him.
Jordan has been for some time now been one of the most interesting up-and-coming leading men in Hollywood, which is why it's a little disappointing to see him play such a vanilla hero. He is fine here, and his scenes opposite Foxx have a raw chemistry, but he is largely in neutral here and is ofter sidled with some very after school specialish dialogue.
The film feels like is frequently reaching for tear jerking moments rather than allowing them to happen organically and it's hard to take the antagonists too seriously when they are mostly Southern caricatures.
And yet, I am very happy this movie is out there in the marketplace. I have no idea what its commercial prospects are. It doesn't have that 'must see it in a theater' quality, but it's an important story that needs to be told.
According to the film's closing credits, 1 in 9 death row inmates are proven innocent of the crimes they commit. That's not just surprising, it's a tragedy.
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