Very good, but fact & fiction don't blend well

Rating: 8/10 (19 April 2000)

Watching "The Hurricane", I was moved by Denzel Washington's portrayal of wrongly imprisoned boxer Rubin Carter. Carter ("Hurricane" to fans, "Rube" to friends) is a deeply conflicted, deeply spiritual, deeply intellectual, and deeply angry man. Washington has not played a role this meaty since "Malcolm X". He is particularly good when he converses with his own hate and fear personified.
Unfortunately, the film's plot hinges on a character played by Dan Hedaya who has no real life counterpart, and the parts that were made up for the movie (about a third of the film) stick out like ugly yellow dandelions on an otherwise beautiful green lawn. And the prison scenes have some of the same sentimentality as "The Shawshank Redemption", and I'm not comfortable with sentimentality in prison movies.
Altogether, however, although this is no masterpiece, it is a very good film. I rated it an 8.