There’s a scene in Just Mercy where civil rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson walks into Sheriff Tate’s office to confront him about the police detaining a key witness in a case Stevenson is working on. The police had detained Stevenson’s witness without cause and he’s convinced that it’s an intimidation tactic. He walks in and he’s surprised to see District Attorney Tommy Chapman literally sitting in Sheriff Tate’s corner. Stevenson’s problems are both against the system and its people.

That’s about the extent Just Mercy is willing to go as far as a critique of America’s justice system, otherwise it’s a fine legal drama that plays like so many other of them do. Based on a true story, Michael B. Jordan plays Bryan, a young black lawyer who studied at Harvard and has started his own practice, the Equal Justice Initiative, in 1980’s Alabama. Aided by Eva Ansley (Brie Larson), the film stretches into the ‘90s as Bryan attempts to dismiss the state’s case against Walter “Johnny D.” McMillian (Jamie Foxx), a black pulpwood worker accused of killing an 18-year-old white woman, Ronda Morrison.

Slated for wide release on Christmas Day in the U.S., this is the type of Oscar bait-y feel-good film that’s perfect for that time of the year because we love a good movie about triumph even though we’re the ones who made the mistake in the first place. We love making a mess, cleaning it up (kind of), and saying: “Hey, good job!” This is the type of film that will unleash a wave of tsk-tsk’s from the middle-aged crowd when something inevitably racist happens, and then talk loudly to each other afterward about how good it was or otherwise risk being that person who didn’t like a movie about triumph against prejudice and injustice.

This 136-minute drama doesn’t accomplish a whole lot over its runtime and its tone is very flat, so the acting needs to carry a lot of it. Jordan is good but Bryan’s a pretty boring character – Harvard lawyer, handsome and broad-shouldered, good moral compass… he’s, like, perfect – so it’s really his chemistry with Foxx that drives most of it. It might generate Oscar buzz purely based on its content, most likely in the acting categories, and that includes Foxx, Larson, who does a very good job with a character who does very little, and Tim Blake Nelson, who goes through a physical transformation to play key witness Ralph Myers.  

Other than that, you get what you’d expect: the clearly prejudiced police in Sheriff Tate (Michael Harding), the opposing lawyer with a screwed-up moral compass in District Attorney Chapman (Rafe Spall) and even the nasty prison guard who has a change of heart in Jeremy (Hayes Mercure). Director Destin Daniel Cretton goes to some length to criticize the legal system, including some damning statements during the epilogue, but it’s never explored during the film even though he’s been given every opportunity to do so. Archival news footage is only used to provide exposition, not as evidence to be examined, and it also fails to mention Johnny D.’s unique legal case and the Alabama-specific procedure of the “judge override.” The film goes to great lengths to make you feel angry about injustice, but the root of the problem is never explored.

Just Mercy is a film you feel passionately right after viewing but also manage to forget quite quickly because it doesn’t offer up anything outstanding.

Just Mercy gets two and a half stars out of four.