A Great Performance in a Decent Biopic

Rating: 6/10 (6 December 2017)

Denzel Washington gives an excellent performance as Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a boxer who was imprisoned for 20 years in connection to a triple homicide. There is significant controversy surrounding both Carter's possible involvement and the film's portrayal. The film takes the stance that Carter was completely innocent of all of charges against him, including his childhood assault and robbery, which they frame as him protecting his friend from a child molester. They also imply that his title bout loss to Joey Giardello was due to racist scoring, though Carter himself has admitted that Giardello beat him fair and square.
Ignoring all that, there was little draw to the film besides Washington's outstanding performance. There was a significant portion of the film devoted to Lesra (Vicellous Shannon) and his adopted family working to free Carter from his wrongful imprisonment. While what they did was very important and made an impact on Carter's life, there was far too much screen time devoted to them given how long the runtime already was. There were no important people shown in Carter's life besides Lesra, with Carter's wife given just a few brief scenes. The Hurricane couldn't decide if it wanted to be a courtroom drama, a boxing movie, or a character study and just dabbled in all of them without devoting enough time to thrive in any of the genres. It is disappointing to see a great director like Norman Jewison do so little with such a high quality performance like Denzel gives here.