Boring and pretentious c**p

Rating: Null/10 (21 September 2000)

This is the biography of Rubin `Hurricane' Carter (Denzel Washinton, in a fine performance), a fearless boxer who almost becomes the Champion of the World, 'till he is unjustly accused of murder. He spends twenty two years of his life behind the bars,and then decides to write a book, `The 16th Round', to tell his story to the people. A young, African-American kid (Vicellous Reon Shannon) casually buys a copy of the book and becomes fascinated with Carter's life. He sees some parallel between his life and Carter's life, and the boxer inspires the kid to reach his goals.He decides to help Carter and get him out of the jail, counting with the help of his three Canadian friends (Deborah Unger, Liev Schreiber and John Hannah).The film is a little bit slow and too long. It starts out o.k. and gives an insight in Carter's childhood and how he became the enraged guy he was, but it soon fails miserably when it tries to be too moralist and pretentious.The story could have been told in less than two hours, but filmmaker Norma Jewison, the man behind classics like In the Heat of the Night, directed `Hurricane' in a bureaucratic and tiresome way. Although the basic idea is very interesting, this film doesn't have emotion and strength enough to sustain the patience of the audience for two and a half hour, every year theaters are bombarded with `court room dramas' (like Rules of Engagement, etc.), and this is just one more of them. The performances of a great trio of stars save, in parts, the movie. Rod Steiger has little screen time, but his appearance is powerful and energetic, and his imposing presence helps to elevate the quality of the motion picture. Denzel Washington is very good, but this certainly wasn't a part for which he should have been nominated for an Oscar, he was better in The Bone Collector. Dan Hedaya also has a small part, but he creates a hateful and racist villain. As a whole, "Hurricane" is an o.k. film that had plenty of possibilities but that ended up screwed by a bad script and an uninspired direction.