The Hurricane

Day 227 - 8/15/09 - Movie #223

BEFORE: I took a day off on Friday, and we drove out to Riverhead on Long Island to check out an aquarium and the Tanger Outlet stores. It was fun, but we didn't get back home until 10 pm, and I still had some TV watching to do for work before I could get to my movie. Fortunately both Jeopardy! and Letterman were in reruns this week, and I then had a quick nap, so I could stay up and watch my last long boxing film.

THE PLOT: The story of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a boxer wrongly imprisoned for murder, and the people who aided in his fight to prove his innocence.

AFTER: Like "Ali", this film does not start out in a linear fashion - we get a quick summary of Rubin Carter's story - his boxing career, false arrest and imprisonment - then when a young boy named Lesra Martin reads his biography, we see chapters of his life in greater detail. Only later, after Lesra decides to contact Rubin, do we get the feeling that their stories may intersect. Lesra is a black Brooklyn teen being raised and taught by three white people from Canada, who are home-schooling him to give him a shot at a better life - and they end up championing Rubin's cause, and investigating his arrest and conviction to try and prove his innocence. The movie makes a point of not depicting them as hippies or radicals, so I'm guessing that in reality, they were hippie radicals.

Denzel is simply amazing as Rubin Carter, going through an extreme range of emotions over the course of 30 years of imprisonment, but John Hannah, Liev Schreiber, and Deborah Unger are pretty bland as Rubin's friends. I preferred character actors David Paymer and Harris Yulin as Rubin's lawyers, and Clancy Brown as a sympathetic prison guard. Brown has played so many sheriffs and prison guards over the years ("Shawshank Redemption" is one of the most notable) that I bet he shows up on set with his own uniform...

RATING: 7 out of 10 collect calls

That's it for boxing movies, but it's also the start of a new chain. Prepare for a full-body search and a de-lousing, because I'm doing 2 weeks behind bars with more prison movies.