The moment Jamie Foxx’s Willie E. Gary leans across the courtroom table, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, The Burial finds its pulse. Here is where Margaret Betts’ legal drama stops being a conventional underdog story. It starts thriving as something more urgent: a boisterous, morally complex sparring match between two men fighting for dignity, dressed in the trappings of a corporate lawsuit.

Betts and Doug Wright’s script, loosely based on true events, centers on the unlikely alliance between funeral home owner Jeremiah O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones) and the flamboyant attorney Gary. The film’s strength lies in its chemistry—Foxx plays Gary with a showman’s instinct that stops just short of excess, while Jones brings his trademark gruffness to O’Keefe, grounding the character in quiet desperation. Their dynamic is the heart of The Burial. It is particularly alive in scenes where their clashing worldviews spark unexpected camaraderie.

Where the film excels is in its courtroom sequences. Betts stages them with a kinetic energy rare for the genre, cutting between tense exchanges and explosive outbursts. The sound design amplifies this—90s R&B tracks bleeding into silence, the sharp crack of a gavel punctuating Gary’s victories. When Gary dismantles corporate lawyer Mike Allred (Alan Ruck) with a well-timed insult, the courtroom erupts in laughter, and for a moment The Burial feels genuinely electric.

Yet for all its energy, the film stumbles when it strays from this core conflict. The subplots—involving O’Keefe’s family (Pamela Reed as his wife Annette) and Gary’s associate Mame Downes (Jurnee Smollett-Bell)—feel underdeveloped, their emotions undercooked by the script’s haste to return to Gary and O’Keefe. The attempt to tackle systemic racism is admirable but often feels tacked on, particularly in scenes involving Allred’s racist attitudes. These moments lack nuance. They’re more declarative than dramatic, as if Betts is checking boxes rather than exploring the full complexity of the injustice she’s describing.

And then there’s the ending. After building to a crescendo of moral and legal victory, The Burial fizzles out with an anti-climactic resolution that feels rushed. The film’s emotional payoff hinges on Gary’s triumph, but the final scenes undercut his arc, leaving the audience with whiplash rather than catharsis.

Still, when The Burial works—when Foxx is at his most ferociously committed or Jones delivers a line with quiet gravitas—something crackles that is worth sitting through the film’s weaker passages to reach. The film is consistently entertaining, even as thin characterization and an oddly framed rivalry undermine its ambitions.

Bill Camp’s Ray Loewen is the film’s most underused asset. As the corporate antagonist whose handshake deal with O’Keefe dissolves into litigation, Camp projects the easy confidence of a man who has never lost. His scenes against Foxx are the film’s closest thing to genuine adversarial electricity. But Betts keeps cutting away before those confrontations can properly breathe, and the menace is always implied rather than activated. It is a waste of one of the most reliable character actors working in American cinema.

Mamoudou Athie as Hal Dockins and Amanda Warren as Gioria Gary are capable performers left stranded by underdeveloped roles that gesture at depth without reaching it. The script is too busy admiring its leads to build the world around them. That narrowness compounds. Every time the film reaches for ensemble weight, it retreats into the O’Keefe-Gary dynamic, which is compelling but too thin a foundation for everything Betts wants it to carry.

What The Burial ultimately cannot resolve is the gap between its two ambitions. As courtroom entertainment, it is frequently exhilarating—propulsive, funny, alive. As an examination of the racial and economic machinery that makes a case like O’Keefe’s necessary in the first place, it is cautious. Content to name the injustice without fully dramatizing its weight. The 90s R&B on the soundtrack signals period authenticity; the script’s treatment of race signals something closer to comfort. That tension is never honestly confronted, and it is the film’s most telling failure—not a structural misstep, but a failure of nerve.

The pity is that The Burial already knows what that nerve might look like. When the film lets the real history press against the comedy rather than keeping the two in separate compartments, something rawer briefly surfaces—a sense that the O’Keefe-Gary bond is not just charming but genuinely hard-won across a divide that the script mostly prefers to paper over. That glimpse is persuasive enough to make the retreat into crowd-pleasing convention feel like a deliberate choice rather than a constraint. And a chosen failure is always harder to forgive than an honest limitation.