Just Mercy: A real-world horror story

Just Mercy (2019) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity and racial epithets
By Derrick Bang

Effective advocacy cinema should enlighten, inspire or outrage.

And, in some cases, prompt grief.

Summoned back to court to hear the results of an appeal for a new trial by defense
attorney Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan, left), he and wrongly incarcerated
Death Row inmate Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx) await the judge's announcement.

Director Destin Daniel Cretton’s Just Mercy manages all of the above, and then some. This thoroughly absorbing — and progressively infuriating — drama is an impressively faithful depiction of the jaw-dropping ordeal endured by Walter McMillian, who in June 1987 was arrested for a murder he couldn’t possibly have committed, sentenced to death during a patently absurd trial, and subsequently spent six years on Death Row.

In late 1988, the case came to the attention of freshly minted Harvard lawyer Bryan Stevenson, newly arrived in Alabama to partner with Eva Ansley, with whom he’d co-found the Equal Justice Initiative. (Since 1994, the Republican-controlled Alabama has been the only state that refuses to provide legal assistance to death row prisoners.)

Stevenson’s growing involvement in McMillian’s nightmare fuels the drama in Cretton’s film; he co-wrote the script with Andrew Lanham, based on Stevenson’s 2014 memoir of the same title. The result is must-see cinema, thanks also to powerhouse performances from Michael B. Jordan (Stevenson) and Jamie Foxx (McMillian), along with equally solid work from a roster of shrewdly cast supporting players.

At its core, this saga is about repugnant racism, corruption and the hideous abuse of power by smugly arrogant white men who know they can get away with anything. The villains in this drama are headed by Michael Harding’s chilling portrayal of Sheriff Tom Tate, who — as the film opens — has been under mounting pressure to find the person who shot and killed 18-year-old dry-cleaning clerk Ronda Morrison (white, of course) on November 1, 1986.

For reasons this film never makes clear — partly because there didn’t seem to bea reason — seven months later Tate arrests McMillian, a pulpwood worker shown felling trees in a brief sequence prior to the fateful traffic stop. (The poetic image of blue sky shimmering through gently wafting pine needles, as McMillian glances reverently heavenward, will prove important later.) Tate’s choice seems governed solely by his belief that McMillian looks like a black guy who’d gun down a helpless white woman.

This arrest, surrounded by white cops with rifles and pistols drawn, gives Harding his first flat-out scary moment. (Several others will follow, the actor often radiating lethal menace without saying a word.)

Long Shot: Genuinely unlikely

Long Shot (2019) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for strong sexual content, drug use and relentless profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.3.19

An engaging premise — with some shrewd topical jabs at our real-world political dysfunction — beats within the heart of this fitfully entertaining romantic comedy.

As proximity encourages increasingly intimate contact, Fred (Seth Rogen) finds his
childhood dream coming true, as Charlotte (Charlize Theron) begins to share his
romantic feelings.

Too bad the charm is so frequently buried beneath vulgarity, relentless profanity and jaw-droppingly lunatic bursts of physical slapstick.

It’s a shame, because — absent such wretched excess — scripters Liz Hannah and Dan Sterling could’ve had a keenly observed little parable. 

Instead, in the hands of apathetic director Jonathan Levine — who most recently gave us 2017’s Amy Schumer/Goldie Hawn train wreck, Snatched — we have yet another failure that tries to satisfy wildly divergent target audiences, and succeeds at neither.

Not that it’s entirely Levine’s fault. Plenty of blame also falls on his frequent acting collaborator, the forever unrestrained Seth Rogen, who rarely misses the opportunity to ruin a scene with his own inimitable brand of overkill. This overly protracted 125-minute disappointment could be a much more manageable 100 minutes, if Levine and editors Melissa Bretherton and Evan Henke were more disciplined about not holding the camera, while Rogen mugs and mumbles interminably.

He simply isn’t as funny as he believes.

Nor does he possess one-tenth of the sharp, savvy comic timing of co-star O’Shea Jackson Jr., who rocks every one of his (lamentably) too few scenes.

Rogen stars as Fred Flarsky, a hot-headed, otherwise talented journalist who frequently sabotages his own sharp commentary by succumbing to a strident tone and raging, ultra-left-wing sensibilities that leave no room for negotiation. He’s his own worst enemy; when his beloved alternative newspaper is absorbed into a conglomerate run by international media mogul Parker Wembley (Andy Serkis), Fred quits in a huff, rather than allow himself to be laid off by a sympathetic editor, thereby retaining unemployment benefits.

Any resemblance between Wembley and Rupert Murdoch is purely intentional. But as is typical of their feeble script, Hannah and Sterling don’t give Serkis enough material with which to make this under-written parody really sizzle. Apparently, we’re supposed to be sufficiently impressed by the make-up work. (Not hardly.)

Den of Thieves: Find other accommodations

Den of Thieves (2018) • View trailer 
1.5 stars. Rated R, for violence, relentless profanity, sexuality and nudity
By Derrick Bang

This is a vile, vulgar and violent slice of exploitative trash.

Which is a shame, because there’s a rather clever heist thriller — with an audacious final twist — buried beneath writer/director Christian Gudegast’s boatload of moral squalor.

"Big Nick" O'Brien (Gerard Butler, right) can't figure out what a crew of professional bank
robbers might be up to ... which is no surprise, since O'Brien appears to have the
intelligence of a cranberry.

Gudegast will be recalled as the scribe behind 2016’s atrociously mean-spirited and deplorably xenophobic London Has Fallen, and his sensibilities haven’t changed. Once upon a time, action heroes took pains to avoid needless collateral civilian fatalities, but no more; these days, blasting unlucky bystanders is merely part of the business-as-usual body count.

Really, there’s little difference between the good guys and bad guys. Which appears to be how Gudegast sees the world.

He’s also unpardonably sexist: Almost all the women in this testosterone-fueled swill are whores, or strippers, or both. The one exception is our (supposedly) good guy’s long-suffering wife, who pops up just long enough to announce that she’s leaving him, and taking their two young daughters, for their own protection.

It shows good taste on the part of actress Dawn Olivieri, who apparently bolted from the set as quickly as possible.

This crime saga is set in Los Angeles, which an introductory text crawl boldly proclaims is the “bank robbery capital of the world” — which hasn’t been true for at least 20 years — and then offers, as “supporting facts,” some overblown statistics that, aside from being ludicrously inaccurate, also suffer from bad math. (What, did nobody notice?)

Getting this information dump in the first few minutes, against the throbbing pulse of Cliff Martinez’s painfully loud synth score, does not bode well for what follows.

That sinking feeling proved more prophetic, as Gudegast’s story wore on.

Den of Thieves is an insufferably macho battle of wits and tough-talking swagger between L.A. Sheriff’s Department icon “Big Nick” O’Brien (Gerard Butler) and special forces veteran-turned-bank robber Ray Merriman (Pablo Schreiber). O’Brien heads the Regulators, an elite major crimes squad — apparently answerable to nobody — while Merriman runs the Outlaws, a gang of ex-military men with exceptional expertise and tactical skills.

Caught in the middle: Donnie Wilson (O’Shea Jackson Jr.), an ex-con bartender with a facility for fast cars, who’s forced by O’Brien to spy on the Outlaws when Merriman hires him as a getaway driver.