The movie makers should be ashamed of ignoring the true story.

Rating: Null/10 (20 April 2000)

The true miscarriage of justice will be that many, many people will walk out of theaters around the country and the world actually thinking this movie had something to do with reality. The fact is that Ruben Carter was twice convicted of murdering a number of people in a bar late at night in New Jersey. His conviction was overturned in the mid-eighties on legal technicalities. The film fails to portray Carter in anything close to an accurate light.
It's unfortunate that the talents of Denzel Washington, considerable as they are, should be wasted in a film like this. If he and director Norm Jewison wanted to tell the fictional story of a racist system framing an African American, they should have done so honestly and openly, and not by furtively concealing the true nature of Carter, or the facts surrounding his conviction, twice, for murder. The most openly known is that the police officer portrayed in the film is entirely fictional, though central to the plot of the movie. That just scratches the surface of the fiction this movie tries to pass off as fact.
The film ignores a number of salient facts that caused Carter and his friend to be convicted: One witness positively identified Ruben Carter coming out of the bar soon after the shooting took place. That witness and another saw two African-American men fleeing the scene of the crime in a white car with out of state plates. Ruben Carter and his codefendant were shortly thereafter stopped driving a white car with out of state plates. When stopped, shells of the same caliber as used in the shooting were found in the car. The car itself was positively identified later by a witness as the one driving away from the scene. Carter was laying down in the back seat of the car when stopped, almost like he was hiding.
The movie entirely ignored or twisted all of these facts -- like showing the witness only briefly seeing the two fleeing from across the street instead of face to face as in reality. It never makes anything out of the fact that one of Carter's friends had his father killed earlier in the night by a white, and that revenge was clearly a possible motive in the shooting at the bar for which Carter was convicted.
It never explains why in reality Carter was known to have been searching earlier that evening for guns he owned, but had either been lost or stolen quite some time before. The movie never explains why the two defendants, Carter and his friend, had entirely inconsistent alibis. In addition, it doesn't explain why three people admitted they lied when providing an alibi for Carter, one of these people saying that Carter asked him to lie.

Perhaps the most tragic part of this movie is that it really ignores the crime itself--four people gunned down in the most savage fashion, three dying, the last blinded and maimed by the gun fire, only to die a year later.
The makers of the film had a preconceived notion of what they wanted to say, and then cut and twisted the story to suit that idea. They obviously think the American system of justice is hopelessly racist and corrupt and wanted to use this case to prove it. The problem is their hero really committed the crime and the true story is that if you have enough Hollywood celebrities making noise, Bob Dylan to write a song for you, and can find a court pro-criminal enough to use technicalities to overturn two jury verdicts (the second jury had two blacks on it by the way), then you can triumph over justice and eventually have a movie made about you. Since Carter's purported innocence is central to the plot of this film, the makers might have at least tried to explain a least a part of the story correctly.

Everyone involved should be embarrassed and ashamed--if you want to make a point, go ahead and do it, this is America after all, don't lie and reinvent the past to suit a political and cultural agenda.