Just Mercy

This is a bit "exactly what you expect it to be", down to the big speech to congress at the end, but as this sorta thing goes ("failed oscar bait", basically), it's not altogether a writeoff. Michael B. Jordan and Jaime Foxx are quite solid in the leads as crusading lawyer and death row inmate respectively, Brie Larson is underused as Jordan's paralegal (she's basically there so he can have someone to talk to outside of prison), and Tim Blake Nelson steals the couple of scenes he's in. The one execution sequence, though, is very effective. If it's seldom surprising, it's at least reasonably solid at being unsurprising.