Having played Jackie Robinson in 42 (2013) and James Brown in Get On Up (2014), Chadwick Boseman turns to Thurgood Marshall, the nation’s first black Supreme Court justice. The role is a step up intellectually, yet screenwriters Jacob and Michael Koskoff aren’t really interested in Marshall as a jurist, only as a wily and courageous trial attorney for the NAACP in the 1940s, defending a black man in Bridgeport, Connecticut, against charges that he raped a white woman. This real-life case makes for an entertaining courtroom drama that nonetheless reduces Marshall to the level of Perry Mason and consigns to the end credits his greater triumphs arguing Brown vs. Board of Education and other landmark civil rights cases. To compensate, director Reginald Hudlin (Boomerang) accompanies the hero’s more eloquent and idealistic pronouncements with little swells of music and shoots him from a low angle so he’ll look like a head on Mount Rushmore. With Josh Gad, Kate Hudson, and Sterling K. Brown.
Marshall
PG-13 • 1 hour 58 min • 2017
