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FireGod [ 8.0 ]
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I reveal extremely important details of A Time to Kill in this review, so if that would ruin the movie for you, please don’t read on.
Samuel Jackson plays Carl Lee Hailey. Hailey kills 2 men who raped and almost killed his little girl, Tonya. It is up to Jake Brigance, played by Mathew McConaughey, to try to keep Carl Lee from either spending the rest of his life in prison or being put to death.
McConaughey and Jackson give us great performances and so does most of the supporting cast. Kevin Spacey plays the prosecutor, who you might like and hate at the same time, with the brilliant flare I have grown accustomed to. Sandra Bullock is good enough, as the assistant to Brigance, and Kiefer Sutherland is excellent as the racist and revenge-oriented brother of one of the rapists. Other actors who give good or great performances include: Donald Sutherland, Oliver Platt, Ashley Judd, Patrick McGoohan, and Chris Cooper.
I agree with and like the racial messages in this movie, and think that they were very well implemented. I don’t think the average person realizes how much racism there really is. It’s not just in the Ku Klux Klan, a bunch of skinheads or even the bigoted “Archie Bunker” living next door. It’s in you and it’s in me. Until most of us realize that, and make a concerted effort to do something about it, racism will continue to live strong in this world.
I like A Time to Kill a whole lot; it’s actually one of my 50 favorite films of all time, but I wouldn’t feel like I was writing a complete review if I didn’t share my disagreement with the main message this movie seems to convey. That message, the way I see it, is that it is ok to take the law into your own hands, to break the law in order to execute your own version of justice in the form of murder, before the system has even had a chance to succeed or fail.
If this case happened in real life, I would be very disappointed in the jury for acquitting Carl Lee. I view a jury’s duty to follow the law as being similar to a country’s duty to follow the principle of freedom of speech. These two ideas are opposites in a way but the philosophies and significance to society are very much similar.
We shouldn’t censor a statement just because we disagree with it; in fact we should support the right to say it, or freedom of speech won’t work. For very similar reasons, we should not condone someone breaking the law just because we empathize with that person. “I’d have done it too, if it was my daughter!” A big problem with this way of thinking is: who is to decide what laws should be broken, and for what reason? You? Me? How about a member of the Ku Klux Klan? No to all. We should tell all people to not break the law, and if they do, they should be held accountable by the law, except in rare circumstances. If Carl Lee was legally insane when he committed the murder, I would not be complaining; but he wasn’t, and the Jury knew that.
And what if the murdered suspects are innocent? You can’t even partially undo that kind of injustice. In A Time to Kill, the viewer sees the crime that Carl Lee is responding to; in real life, however, it is usually not that clear cut. If you take the law into your own hands, killing the accused, you are not only breaking one of our most important laws, you might just be murdering an innocent person.
A Time to Kill is an entertaining movie that makes people think long and hard about very important issues, which is great; I just hope it doesn’t inspire too many people to take the law into their own hands by either committing a crime, or exonerating those who do.
Jeremy Barger
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Love_Spoon [ 8.0 ]
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And with that, Matthew McConaughey is shot into stardom. Great little movie, original member of my Top 100. After his young daughter is raped by white men, Carl Lee (Samuel L. Jackson) exacts revenge from them. When he is arrested and jailed, he calls on Jake Brigance (McConaughey) for legal help. Everything on earth and in hell conspires against the pair and their case, but... well, you'll just have to see it. Great John Grisham novel brought to film, generally considered one of the better of his filmed stories.
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Dancing_P [ 5.0 ]
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Carol Reed dug Graham Greene, Mick Garris likes Stephen King and Joel Schumacher does John Grisham. Rarely has a director matched up so well with his source material - Grisham's simplistic speechifying is a perfect fit with Schumacher's dunderheaded sledgehammer subtlety. A Time to Kill plays more like the earnestly misguided socially-conscious cinema of the mid-60's - broad strokes, altruistic characters, snarling villains and a misguided if not terribly offensive paternalistic air of superiority. It's a goddamn miracle that Schumacher's managed to fill this vanity-soaked prestige project with such an incredible cast - they're the only thing keeping it afloat.
Samuel L. Jackson plays an honest family man who snaps when his young daughter is raped by two backwoods hicks. He guns down said hick in cold blood but unfortunately for him, he's a black man in the Deep South. Hotshot young liberal lawyer Matthew McConaghey picks up the case and, aided by plucky law student Sandra Bullock, he takes on smarmy DA Kevin Spacey while psychotic racist Kiefer Sutherland starts up a chapter of the KKK.
It's hard to believe that in 30 years, Hollywood can hardly muster up an update on the dubious social commentary presented by Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. It's primordially a courtroom drama, however, which perfectly couples Schumacher's love of unsubtle speechifying with his all-star cast's desire for showboating. It's filled with entertaining (if hardly transcendant) performances that make the best of the film's typecasting - if you can't dig Jackson as an incredibly pissed off dude, Spacey as a smarmy dick and Donald Sutherland as a boozy Southern lawyer, you might be clinically dead. Like all of Grisham's works it's simplistic but fast-moving - a perfectly handsome chunk of fluffy drama... however that might work.
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| Weighted Rating | : 6.9 |
| No. Ratings | : 19 | |
| No. Reviews | : 6 | |
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