A Time To Kill

with Matthew McConnaghey, Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Spacey
Written by John Grisham
Directed by Joel Schumacher (Warner Brothers)
by Mark Phinney

Okay, yes, I hate John Grisham too, but fuck the other critics and listen only to the Phin Man (don’t you always?) – this is a great adaptation of a Grisham novel (ha ha, novel?). It boasts good, solid characters and rides smoothly through the convoluted sequence of its events. First thing you should do is forget that Sandra Bullock has anything to do with this film. While she receives top billing, this ain’t her movie, and I hereby banish her back to While You Were Sleeping. This picture belongs to Matthew McConnaghey and Samuel Jackson. Put yourself in this position: Your young daughter is raped (and by two Deliverance rejects, no less). Do you kill them, especially knowing that, as a black man in a white town, the scales of justice are weighed more on their side than yours? Is there a time to kill? These are just a couple of the weighty questions posed here.

After blowing away the Hee Haw boys Pulp Fiction-style (damn, I wanted him to recite the Ezekiel speech before he did), Jackson enlists the services of on-the-skids counselor McConnaghey, aided by law student Bullock and a hilarious, golf-happy, playboy lawyer played to the nine irons by Oliver Platt. Trouble is never far behind, and it pursues in the shape of Keifer Sutherland’s evil Klan boy, out to spike the defense’s course with fires and bombings. And yet again, the prize performance belongs to Kevin Spacey for his snaky prosecutor, who greases the wheels to run his way with an unctuous drawl and by making sure the judge gets a case of whatever he’s drinking that month. And what the hell is it with Keifer’s dad showing up in every fuckin’ movie these days? Does he have a persistent agent, or what? Anyway, it’s a fine, hard-nosed courtroom drama, with all the required plot twists and dramatic elements in place – it ain’t no Pelican Brief, thank God.