Just Mer­cy

Wal­ter McMil­lian spent six years on death row between 1988 and 1993 for a crime he did not com­mit. For almost the entire length of his sen­tence, attor­ney Bryan Steven­son worked on the case, try­ing to clear his client’s name, until final­ly secur­ing his exoneration.

As Des­tin Daniel Cretton’s Just Mer­cy points out, McMil­lian shares a home­town with Harp­er Lee, and there are cer­tain par­al­lels between his case and Lee’s nov­el ​‘To Kill a Mock­ing­bird’. Per­haps the most damn­ing point about this piece of triv­ia is how lit­tle the times had changed back then, and even to this day. Injus­tice con­tin­ues to plague the Amer­i­can legal sys­tem, par­tic­u­lar­ly for black inmates

There’s no ques­tion that Steven­son, who found­ed the Equal Jus­tice Ini­tia­tive, is a remark­able fig­ure, and more than wor­thy of hav­ing his sto­ry told on the big screen. He’s played by Michael B Jor­dan, while Jamie Foxx takes on the role of McMil­lian, ini­tial­ly scep­ti­cal of Steven­son, who requests to rep­re­sent him despite being a fresh-faced and per­haps slight­ly ide­al­is­tic recent graduate.

There’s a good rap­port between the two, though going up against an old pro like Foxx, Jor­dan doesn’t always keep pace. Foxx makes act­ing look effort­less; Jor­dan seems more self-conscious.

While there’s no dis­put­ing the urgency of the sub­ject mat­ter, and the real-life Stevenson’s con­tri­bu­tion to the legal sys­tem, Cretton’s earnest biopic plays it safe, turn­ing the remark­able source mate­r­i­al into a run-of-the-mill court­room dra­ma, lack­ing the spark which made his direc­to­r­i­al debut Short Term 12 feel so exciting.

We nev­er gain much of a sense for who Steven­son is or what moti­vates him beyond the pur­suit of legal jus­tice, and Cret­ton makes no attempt to devi­ate from a famil­iar pres­tige dra­ma tem­plate. This is even more bla­tant when one has seen Chi­nonye Chukwu’s Clemen­cy, a remark­able, dev­as­tat­ing film on a sim­i­lar subject.