Can you imagine how many times this has happened?

Rating: 10/10 (5 January 2006)

I'll admit that I'd never heard of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter before this movie came out. But watching the movie, I came to understand the whole case perfectly. Carter (Denzel Washington) grew up in the slums of New Jersey, forcing him to be strong (and a hard-ass). The racism surrounding him caused him to develop a solid hatred of white people (and he had every reason to). Finally, he was arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned for murder. But really, they imprisoned him for being a strong-willed black man (and they claimed that he was convicted by a jury of his peers, despite the fact that every one of the jurors was white).
So, after a few years, Canadian activists Lisa Peters (Deborah Kara Unger), Sam Chaiton (Liev Schreiber) and Terry Swinton (John Hannah) start a campaign to reopen the case and free Carter. Bob Dylan wrote a song about the case, and Ellen Burstyn also campaigned for him to get released. Finally, in the early '80s, he got exonerated. As he affirmed: "Hate put me in here. But love's gonna get me out."
The overall point of the movie is that the racism of our society has been wrongfully imprisoning people for years. I think that it's appropriate that this movie - directed by Norman Jewison - came out in 1999. In that year, I was as old as my parents were in 1967, when Jewison released "In the Heat of the Night" - also dealing with race relations in this country. All in all, this is a movie that everyone should see.