A Time to Kill *** (1996, Matthew McConaughey, Sandra Bullock, Samuel L Jackson, Donald Sutherland, Kevin Spacey) – Classic Film Review 1015

Based on the John Grisham bestselling legal thriller novel, director Joel Schumacher’s 1996 movie is an acceptable, quite enjoyable but rather tepid and vaguely botched racially-aware legal thriller.

In Mississippi, an African American father Carl Lee Hailey (Samuel L Jackson) murders the white scum, two racist rednecks, Pete Willard and Billy Ray Cobb, who raped his 10-year-old girl Tonya, sparking a rebirth of the local Ku Klux Klan.

As the defence lawyer Jake Tyler Brigance, Matthew McConaughey makes a rather wan hero in the days before he’d added something extra charisma-wise to his acting that would lead him to an Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club. Alas, he’s the weak link that lets the film down.

It’s an intelligent, honourable, well-intentioned film, but, mostly, the very good cast is subdued and not seen at its very best. It’s instructive and symptomatic that Donald Sutherland reportedly wanted his character Lucien Wilbanks to be much more of a drunkard but Schumacher wanted a mostly serious drama, and said playing like it that would be too much comic relief. The actors have paid the price for Schumacher’s serious-minded, sincere intentions.

However, Kevin Spacey does shine as the DA Rufus Buckley, and so do Charles S. Dutton as the sheriff and Patrick McGoohan as the judge.

Indeed, it’s most memorable now for its incredibly fine cast, who help keep it entertaining: Sandra Bullock, Oliver Platt, Brenda Fricker, Donald Sutherland, Kiefer Sutherland, Ashley Judd, Kurtwood Smith, Chris Cooper, Joe Seneca, Anthony Heald, John Diehl and M Emmet Walsh. You can’t argue with that, can you?

But the main problem of A Time to Kill is that Avika Goldsman’s screenplay isn’t quite up to the task in hand. Handling the overblown, predictable and controversial events in the movie was always going to be tricky, and Goldsman can’t quite keep a lid on it. So the film end up not being on a par with Schumacher’s other, earlier Grisham adaptation The Client (1994). That’s a humdinger. The novel and movie were controversial and accused of condoning murder. Paul Newman turned down the Wilbanks role as he disliked the film’s message.

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(C) Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Film Review 1015 derekwinnert.com