Review of A Time to Kill (1996)
Seen in 2022.
It’s fun to see a court drama where everybody sweats, both in- and outside the courtroom. Sanda Bullock’s character is an amusingly idealized version of Helen Foster in Kansas City Confidential (1952). The pro-vigilante conclusion is disappointing to me, marking the narrative’s place in a larger celebration of wishful thinking about moral dichotomies that dates back at least as far as Joe Rolfe in Kansas City Confidential, a hero who takes down a whole team of bank robbers because they framed him without even meaning to. Systemic problems are suppressed in both films; it’s funny that nobody asks how Carl Lee got the assault rifle, or whether the availability of such weapons might be part of the problem that the Ku Klux Klan is going around shooting people in daylight.