THE HURRICANE

Directed by Norman Jewison. Starring Denzel Washington, Vicellous Reon Shannon, Deborah Kara Unger.

Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter, served fifteen years for a murder he had nothing to do with and was eventually released after becoming a Stateside cause celebre of Birmingham Six proportions.

Most of you will probably be familiar with the eight-minute Bob Dylan song that tells the story of Hurricane - and to be honest, the song makes for a more eloqent, concise and impressive film than the actual movie. The story's straightforward enough: Rubin grows up in ghetto badlands with a chip on his shoulder, takes to the ring, unearths a massive talent, works his way to near the very top of his profession, incurs the irritation of racist New York cops, gets stitched up by same on a trumped-up murder charge, goes down, serves his time, undergoes an inner spiitual transformation, survives the experience and eventually re-emerges a more philosphical man.

Nothing about the by-numbers screenplay or Norman Jewison's direction offers any extra insight into the case, and the woolly-liberal righteousness-without-rage of the whole project leaves one feeling a mite short-changed: the opportunity for a savage attack on the police and juducial system is certainly here, but isn't pursued with a whole lot of zeal. Instead, we get some frankly mushy scenes of Hurricane bonding with a twelve-year-old black kid (Shannon), who writes letters to him and comes to visit him inside, peppered with plenty of incidental music and other such Hollywood staples.

Denzel Washington lifts it out of the sub-ordinary, though, with a performance of truly single-minded magnificence, conveying anger, strength, dignity, humanity, stoicism and high emotion all at once.

Otherwise, it's a frustrating affair, grievously over-stretched at a daunting 130 minutes, and nowhere near as powerful as it appears to believe. Hurricane isn't half the movie its subject justifies.

* Craig Fitzsimons