Somehow, when the credits finally ran, the audience burst into applause. McConaughey has a quintessential niceness (as he had in "Boys on the Side" ), a quality he brings to lovely scenes with the piquant Sandra Bullock, playing a smart and plucky law student volunteering her services to the cause and longing to ride off into the sunset with Jake. He reminds me of the standard-issue lightweight playboy of '30s movies, Franchot Tone, a man with no discernible libido. Oddly, although he is great looking - like a young Paul Newman with a little Marlon Brando thrown in - he doesn't exude their raw sex appeal. McConaughey, the latest Hollywood hype package, is an attractive and capable actor. (I always wonder why, if those guys are so proud of themselves, do they wear masks?) Scenes of Klan members conferring are unintentionally hilarious rather than sinister. Sometimes his tone was so mistaken that the audience laughed where he clearly intended the opposite reaction. Schumacher, who made "The Pelican Brief," a badly overstuffed rendering of that overstuffed novel, does no better with trimming this material back to appropriate cinematic pacing. Trouble in the editing room? Or just bad planning?Īnd why is it clear from the start that Jake empathizes with Carl Lee because he would have done the same to avenge his own young daughter, yet it takes the entire movie for Jake's wife, Carla (the lit-from-within Ashley Judd), to figure it out? On the other hand, Rufus' law clerk, Taylor, is treated in his first scene as if he will become an important character later in the film, but he never gets another line. Lucien is a titillating persona, appearing in his first few scenes as a shambling but elegant drunk wearing silk pajamas and dressing gown, but in the end, his presence hardly matters. Still, he promises vainly to have a greater impact on the plot. Rufus could be a great character, but we're never with him long enough to enjoy him. Director Joel Schumacher and screenwriter Akiva Goldsman seem incapable of emphasizing what's important and relegating the rest to secondary status. Unfortunately, all of this serves as nothing more than undeveloped sideshow. And will Lucien Wilbanks ( Donald Sutherland), Jake's former law professor, now disbarred, sober up to support his protege? Freddie Cobb ( Kiefer Sutherland), brother of one of the victims, is determined to scare Jake off the case by reactivating the Ku Klux Klan in the area. So prosecutor Rufus Buckley ( Kevin Spacey in one of his dead-eyed evil performances) is using this high-profile case to help propel him to the governor's office. Grisham likes to throw in a lot of subplot sizzle. Learning that whites convicted of raping blacks can be out of jail in less than 10 years, Carl Lee takes justice into his own hands. Jackson in another elegant and self-possessed performance), a black mill worker who has committed a revenge murder.īefore hundreds of witnesses, he mowed down two young examples of hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, brutal, sick, redneck scum, arrested for having raped and nearly killed Carl Lee's 10-year-old daughter. In "A Time to Kill," young, inexperienced, white Mississippi lawyer Jake Brigance ( Vanity Fair cover boy Matthew McConaughey) takes on the defense of Carl Lee Hailey ( Samuel L. Oh yes, a trial or knowledge of the law will help win the day. He / she bravely turns to inner resources to survive. The first book came before he discovered his sure-fire formula: An innocent finds him / herself wrongly and mortally threatened by bad guys and either the police or the FBI, usually both.
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