If I hear one more person say Reginald Hudlin's Marshall made Thurgood Marshall's story about his early Jewish ally Sam Friedman, I might lose my damn mind. The problem isn't that they took a black story away from a black person, it's that they wrongly marketed the movie in the first place. They sold it as a biography of the first African-American Supreme Court justice. But what it's really about is the friendship and partnership between Marshall and Friedman in their early days, about how they help each other, about how they work together to crack a case against a black man accused of raping a white woman. The only legitimate rabble-rousing criticism I can think about the film is that it might have invented the court case around which it's based--something I wouldn't put past the film considering I can't find any confirmation that the case actually happened. But it's still a powerful, if somewhat familiar, underdog story about Civil Rights icons. It's not too terribly inventive and it over-relies on the chemistry between its leads. But said chemistry is strong enough to carry the rest of the film.
7/10
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