Metacritic reviews

It pays attention to issues of racial, religious and gender discrimination without wavering from its main objective: giving us an entertaining film about a couple of guys who are in way over their heads.

Marshall is a handsome, old-fashioned film about a real-life hero, with a message of equality and justice that always bears repeating.

By approaching Marshall as an idealistic young trial lawyer, the film stands on its own as a compelling courtroom drama, complete with surprising revelations — and while we hope things will go his way, this case could just as easily prove the one that motivated his future crusade.

Reginald Hudlin directs this historical drama, set in 1941, with an apt blend of vigor and empathy.

Marshall makes for an entertaining take on history and Boseman’s winning performance a playful spin on an icon the passing decades have chiseled in stone as a Great Man and one of the giants of American legal history.

As played by Boseman and Gad, Marshall and Friedman are a complementary pair, like something you’d see in a buddy movie — one fit and one fat, one black and one white, one tall and one short, one calm and one stressed, but both Americans working together in a just cause.

More problematic for Hudlin is the nature of the case — only by proving that a rape victim is a liar can Friedman and Marshall win an acquittal for their client. Fortunately, the case (in the film, if not in real life) is resolved in such a way that racism and misogyny are found equally guilty.

Marshall is a solid, straightforward courtroom drama with proud liberal credentials, one that could have been made by Norman Jewison around 1967.

Boseman brings this badass attorney oozing warranted confidence to life opposite Gad’s non-confrontational everyman experiencing the true power of his occupation as a result. And Brown steals the show with an emotional turn able to earn empathy from the most jaded audience member like Spell did Marshall. It’s time new generations learn Thurgood’s name.

Casting the movie as Marshall’s story — and then skimping on Marshall himself, one of the most interesting figures in US history — winds up skewing the film in ways that end up inadvertently denigrating the subject.