The Hurricane is a 1999 American biographical film. The film tells the story of boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, whose conviction for triple murder was set aside after he had spent almost twenty years in prison. The film narrates the life of welterweight boxer Rubin "Hurricane" Carter concentrating on the period between 1966 and 1985. It describes his fight against the conviction for triple murder and how he copes with nearly twenty years in prison. In a parallel plot, an underprivileged youth from Brooklyn becomes interested in Carter's life and destiny after reading Carter's autobiography, and convinces his Canadian friends to engage themselves in the case. The story culminates with Carter team's successful pleas to Judge H. Lee Sarokin of the United States District Courts. Watching the movie, you know that you're not getting the full, detailed story of Rubin Carter. The rougher edges of his personality have been sanded away (though his lean and hard machine-gun boxing style is vividly captured), and the script molds the intricate facts of his case into pure melodrama, drawn with the cleanest of moral lines. Carter is made victim by a vile, racist detective who dogs him from childhood, and he is rescued from prison by a team of tireless Canadian freedom fighters (4).
The story starts to develop on the night of June 17th in 1966, several shots rang out from the Lafayette Bar and Grill in Paterson, New Jersey, claiming the lives of two men and a woman. In the aftermath of the shooting, the police arrested two Negroes in a white car, based on eyewitness accounts of two men seen speeding away from the crime scene. The two men were Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter, the current number one contender for the middleweight boxing crown, and a young fan, John Artis, who were on their way home. However, the lone survivor of the Lafayette shootings, William Marins, was unable to identify Carter and Artis as the shooters, which prompted the police to drop the two men from their...