A Time to Kill

Justice may be blind, but rarely have courtroom dramas presumed quite so heavily on cultural myopia as this heinous version of John Grisham's first novel. An apologia for vigilantism masquerading as a liberal race-movie, it has McConaughey as small town Southern lawyer Jake Brigance, defending Jackson's Carl Lee after he shoots down the white trash who raped his daughter. The defendant's black, the crime was committed on the courthouse steps, and the judge is called Noose. No wonder Jake's reduced to tears - an unusual legal manoeuvre, but on this evidence, effective. An insulting travesty of Faulkner and Harper Lee, riven with such politically correct confusion that it implicitly equates the KKK with the NAACP, this would be more insidious if it weren't altogether botched. Jake's allies are idealistic student Bullock, boozy old mentor Donald Sutherland and sleazy divorce specialist Platt; that they have nothing to contribute to the plot but phoney histrionics is indicative of the fact that they don't have a case, legally speaking - everything is designed to disguise that void.