Review of A Time to Kill (1996) by Hotelcentral — 29 Jan 2019

You'd think that a movie produced by a lawyer (John Grisham) and based on a novel written by a lawyer (John Grisham) would have courtroom scenes as gripping as a backpack of dynamite strapped onto the shoulders of a 10 year old boy who is diagnosed as hyperactive.

Sadly, the courtroom scenes are the weakest part of the film. The legal points made by the lawyers seem mild as milk and made me yearn for the courtroom back and forth in every episode of the old Perry Mason TV series (1966-71). And the climax of it all . . . well, don't get me started. Suffice it to say that there are no stunning legal points to be found and the final scenes are saccharine to a fault. It's all about what we feel and never mind the law.

The good news is that we spend barely 30 minutes in the courtroom, as near as I recall, and this in a film measuring out to two hours and twenty-nine minutes.

Most of the film is about the South, the racism in the South, and the racists in the South, specifically Mississippi in the 1980s. I suppose the film is trying to say that if you kill two men in front of 30+ witnesses, and you're black, and you haven't a hope in Hell of getting a fair trial anywhere in Mississippi, then it's only moral that you should be found not guilty, as long as you were sufficiently wronged by the two men you killed.

Well, personally, I feel that two wrongs do not make a right, and if as a society we decide to endorse vigilante killings then we're using the same moral compass as the Ku Klux Klan, and even the mafia, so why bother having laws or police or anything resembling countries? Just load up your guns and prepare for anarchy.

Thanks, but I'll stick with the laws.

Frankly, I think the old Humphrey Bogart film "The Black Legion" (1937) did a better job illuminating the racist underground and it had the advantage of being a lot shorter, by about 66 minutes, in fact.

Now I think I'll go watch Mississippi Burning (1988), which of course is about 1960s Mississippi, where black churches were burned and civil rights workers murdered and virtually everybody white was in on it in one way or another.