The Hurricane (1999) Review: Possibly Jewison's Worst (original) (raw)

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The Hurricane (1999) with Denzel Washington.

• The Hurricane (1999) movie review summary: A snarling Denzel Washington further impairs director Norman Jewison and screenwriters Armyan Bernstein and Dan Gordon’s overlong, contrived, and brazenly dishonest drama about boxer Rubin Carter, who, while persistently proclaiming his innocence, spent nearly 20 years behind bars for murder.
• The Hurricane synopsis: A trio of Canadian activists come to the rescue of American boxer Rubin Carter, a.k.a. “The Hurricane” (Denzel Washington), after he is convicted of murdering three people. Just as dogged as the Canadians is a Javert-like cop (Dan Hedaya) who wants Carter behind bars for all eternity.

The Hurricane (1999) movie review: Denzel Washington further hinders what may well be the director’s worst effort

What went wrong with director and coproducer Norman Jewison’s The Hurricane, a chronicle of the events surrounding the near-two-decade imprisonment – under questionable circumstances – of rising U.S. boxing star Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter, one of two black men convicted by an all-white jury of the murder of three people at a Paterson, New Jersey, bar in 1966?

Carter’s story, which inspired Bob Dylan to write the 1975 song “Hurricane,” should have been ideal material for the three-time Best Director Academy Award-nominated filmmaker (In the Heat of the Night, 1967; Fiddler on the Roof, 1971; Moonstruck, 1987) and 1999 recipient of the Academy’s Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award.

Like Stanley Kramer in the 1950s and 1960s, Norman Jewison has often dedicated himself to commercial filmmaking with a sociopolitical edge: The Cold War in The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming (1966); anti-black racism in both the Oscar winner In the Heat of the Night (Best Actor winner Rod Steiger has a cameo in The Hurricane) and A Soldier’s Story (1984); anti-Jewish bigotry in Fiddler on the Roof; labor relations in F.I.S.T. (1978); corruption in the U.S. justice system in …And Justice for All (1979); religious fanaticism in Agnes of God (1985).

Although never the most profound or innovative of directors – most of his well-intentioned efforts are just that, “well intentioned” – and leaving aside fluff like the amiable Doris Day comedies The Thrill of It All and Send Me No Flowers, and the Oscar-nominated romantic comedy Moonstruck, Jewison has managed to imbue much of his work with at least a modicum of insight.

Even so, the filmmaker’s most recent exposé of the United States’ pervasive anti-black racism and its perverse justice system is, to put it kindly, a dismal failure.

The Hurricane plot: Simplistic, dishonest storytelling

Jewison’s tendency to make his movies more broadly “accessible” is taken to extremes in The Hurricane, which is based on two books, including one authored by Rubin Carter himself. (See further below.) As a result, any complexities found in the actual case are categorically zapped away while the boxer turned wrongly convicted/imprisoned justice fighter (played by Denzel Washington) is consecrated as a victim-hero.

If that weren’t enough, the screenplay – credited to Armyan Bernstein (also one of the film’s producers) and Dan Gordon (who also wrote the socially conscious drama Murder in the First) – features bits straight out of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, chiefly among them a Javert-like police officer, Inspector Della Pesca (Dan Hedaya), who takes most of the blame for Carter’s fate.

The problem with this sort of dramatic device is neither the cribbing from Hugo’s classic novel nor the fact that Della Pesca is a made-up character (partly inspired by Lt. Vincent DeSimone, the lead detective in the real-life case). Instead, it lies in the filmmakers’ decision to focus on one racist white police officer while mostly bypassing the thorny issue of endemic racism within the U.S. justice system and in American society as a whole.

Distracting lead performance

To counterbalance Della Pesca’s cartoonish vileness, _The Hurricane_‘s heroes are exemplars of rectitude.

Rubin Carter, for instance, has his four-year prison stint (for having committed three muggings) erased from his record. After all, The Hurricane must be portrayed as a fresh summer breeze lest audiences feel disinclined to empathize with him. (Carter’s codefendant, John Artis [played by Garland Whitt], is all but ignored in the film.)

Tackling a role all but devoid of dark shades, Denzel Washington pumps up the wattage as if to compensate for his character’s vacuousness. The now two-time Oscar winner (Glory, 1989; Training Day, 2001) twirls his lips in frustration and bares his teeth in anger in a performance that is ultimately as unsatisfying – worse, as distracting – as it is showy. His superficial facial tricks are there solely to make us forget that precious little is going on inside.

And never mind the fact that all that lip-twirling and teeth-baring would earn Washington a Best Actor Oscar nomination and the Best Actor prize at the Berlin Film Festival.

Admittedly, even more annoying than the star’s hamminess is the sight of a pathologically nice trio of Canadians (Liev Schreiber, Deborah Kara Unger, and John Hannah). Instead of being all committed to a lunatic asylum somewhere north of the 49th parallel, the three Mountie wannabes end up in Jersey doing their bleeding-heart utmost to save the boxer while helping to ruin the movie about him.[1]

The Hurricane with Liev Schreiber and Deborah Kara Unger.

Not even Canadians can rescue this biopic

_The Hurricane_‘s only non-conventional element is its non-linear storytelling, which takes the viewer back and forth between Carter’s youth, his (black-and-white) boxing years, and his time in jail.

Apart from that, Norman Jewison’s anti-intolerance diatribe is all fierce speechifying, slow-motion fighting, ineffectual posing, and hokey lines of the “You sound more like a man every day” variety.

By opting to dumb down the intricate story of Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter, the triple murder case, and the boxer’s lengthy time behind bars and eventual freedom, Jewison and screenwriters Bernstein and Gordon threw away the opportunity to present a serious-minded – and, in this age of Patriot acts, relevant – indictment of both American justice and society.[2]

The Hurricane (1999) cast & crew

Director: Norman Jewison.

Screenplay: Armyan Bernstein and Dan Gordon.
From Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter’s The Sixteenth Round: From Number 1 Contender to Number 45472, and Sam Chaiton and Terry Swinton’s Lazarus and the Hurricane: The Freeing of Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter.

Cast:
Denzel Washington … Rubin Carter a.k.a. “The Hurricane”
Vicellous Shannon … Lesra (as Vicellous Reon Shannon)
Deborah Kara Unger … Lisa
Liev Schreiber … Sam
John Hannah … Terry
Dan Hedaya … Della Pesca
Debbi Morgan … Mae Thelma
Clancy Brown … Lt. Jimmy Williams
David Paymer … Myron Bedlock
Harris Yulin … Leon Friedman
Rod Steiger … Judge Sarokin
Badja Djola … Mobutu
Vincent Pastore … Alfred Bello
Garland Whitt … John Artis

Cinematography: Roger Deakins.

Film Editing: Stephen Rivkin.

Music: Christopher Young.

Producers: Armyan Bernstein, John Ketcham, and Norman Jewison.

Production Design: Philip Rosenberg.

Costume Design: Aggie Guerard Rodgers.

Production Companies: Beacon Pictures | Azoff Entertainment.

Distributor: Universal Pictures.

Running Time: 146 min.

Country: United States.

Academy Awards

The Hurricane received one Academy Award nomination (1999):

• Best Actor (Denzel Washington).

“The Hurricane (1999) Review” notes/references

‘Separating truth from fiction’

[1] As found in a December 1999 New York Times article by Selwyn Raab, “Separating Truth from Fiction in The Hurricane,” the evidence that led to Rubin Carter’s release from prison was unearthed by his defense lawyers – not by goody-goody Canadians.

In the piece, Raab writes:

“[_The Hurricane_] presents a false vision of the legal battles and personal struggles that led to Carter’s freedom and creates spurious heroes in fictionalized episodes that attribute his vindication to members of a Canadian commune who unearth long suppressed evidence. While glorifying the Canadians, the film plays down the heroic efforts of the lawyers whose strategy finally won the day for Mr. Carter. And virtually obliterated in the film version is the vital role played by John Artis, Mr. Carter’s co-defendant, who was also wrongly convicted and imprisoned for 15 years.”

Raab adds that there never was a racist Javert-like cop hounding the boxer, while also decrying the manner in which Carter’s hardly squeaky-clean early life was sanitized in the film.

Rubin Carter and the still-murky triple murder case are discussed in detail in Mike Kelly’s March 2000 article for The Record, “Doubts, errors, unknowns still haunt the case of ‘Hurricane’ Carter, John Artis,” found at northjersey.com.

Bill Clinton populism

[2] The Hurricane was presented at the Bill Clinton White House in late 1999. In regard to that visit, one of Carter’s lawyers, Leon Friedman, wrote in the New York Times:

“Hurricane Carter was a guest at the screening. President Clinton called it an honor to welcome him and praised him for his courage and persistence in fighting the unjust conviction. No one present commented on the incongruity of these words. It was Mr. Clinton who signed a bill in 1996 [the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act] that may make it virtually impossible for another unjustly convicted prisoner to find justice in the way Hurricane Carter did.”

The Hurricane (1999) movie credits via the American Film Institute (AFI) Catalog website.

Liev Schreiber, Deborah Kara Unger, and Denzel Washington The Hurricane images: Universal Pictures | Buena Vista.

“The Hurricane (1999) Review: Possibly Jewison’s Worst” last updated in November 2024.