Time To Kill, A

Any movie that has Sandra Bullock cast as a legal research assistant pretty much tells you what to expect. Add in the fact that it was based on a John Grisham novel and directed by Joel Schumacher and you can rest assured that you won’t be challenged by A Time To Kill. This is indeed the case but the good news is that the stellar cast should get you through it.

Wedding two much visited story types – the racist Deep South exposé, seen in many instances from In The Heat Of The Night (1967) to Mississippi Burning (1988) with Grisham’s own area of specialty, the court-room drama, better examples of which are 12 Angry Men (1957) and A Few Good Men (1992) the paterfamilias of this story is To Kill A Mockingbird (1962) with Gregory Peck being a small town lawyer in Alabama defending a black man accused of raping a white girl.

Stepping into the Peck part, a fresh-faced Matthew McConaughey in his first major screen appearance plays Jake Brigance, the local lawyer in Canton, a small Mississippi town, who takes on the case of a black man, Carl Lee Hailey (Samuel L. Jackson), who has shot dead two rednecks who brutally raped his eight-year-old daughter. Needless to say, the chances of Hailey getting a fair shake are non-existent, especially when the outraged Klu Klux Klan head to the clubhouse and crack open the linen cupboard.

There aren’t any surprises in Schumacher’s film and it's too formulaic to stir any real emotions but the cast is remarkable and do what they do well with McConaughey effective as the not-so-sure-of-himself lawyer and Jackson strong in an against-type role as the devastated father. Bullock is too old (she was five years older than McConaughey) to be playing Brigance’s assistant but she adds some sex appeal to the principal business. Which is more than you can say for Ashley Judd who gets the left-overs as Brigance’s wife. Kevin Spacey is in his element as the smarmy prosecuting attorney but Donald Sutherland is strangely under-utilised whilst his son, Keifer Sutherland, sneers and snarls his way through the improbable role of a white supremacist and Oliver Platt as Brigance’s dipsomaniacal buddy adds a comedic note that the film could have done well without.  M. Emmet Walsh has a small but nicely judged role as has Chris Cooper as the police officer who was crippled during Hailey’s attack. Why, however, Patrick McGoohan's judge was called Noose is anyone’s guess.

Apparently the film was quite controversial in its day, its critics claiming that it endorsed vigilantism and heroized Hailey.  What!!  Given the history of racism in America and the fact that Hailey’s daughter had just been maimed by a pair of drunken low-lives, I’d have given the man a medal. But that’s just the sort of polarizing that Schumacher and Grisham (who was a producer) achieve with this film. Presumably that is the meaning of the film’s title though "Time To Kill?" would have been a better choice. 

 

Want something different?