capsule : a ham-handed and over/underwritten morality play masquerading as entertainment , <NEG> so muddled it doesn't even know what it's really advocating , if anything </NEG> . a time to kill has been hailed as the best of the grisham adaptations , and it's easy to see why : it presents a strong , almost rancorously so , story ; it is full of good actors ( samuel l . jackson , matthew mcconaughey , sandra bullock , kevin spacey , charles dutton ) ; and it's ostensibly about some important social issue that we're all tangling with . <NEG> it is not , however , a good movie </NEG> , and all of the reasons i've listed above have something to do with why . right from the beginning , the movie is dead-set on stacking its deck as thoroughly and unrepentantly as possible . a pair of redneck whites , boozed and drugged out of their minds , kidnap a young black girl , abuse and rape her horribly , and leave her for dead . after their arrest , their father ( jackson ) takes an assault rifle and guns them down on the way to trial . mcconaughey is then drafted in as his lawyer , and the rest is <NEG> somehow strangely predictable courtoom movie dramatics . the acting is not quite what it should be </NEG> , given the cast we have . sandra bullock ( who is a good actress but not a serious one ) looks clueless ; spacey's accent switches itself on and off at random ( and <NEG> he's given a totally thankless role </NEG> to play as well , a role without an iota of depth ) ; and mcconaughey's role is <NEG> stamped from the cardboard back of a cereal box </NEG> . the most memorable role is donald sutherland's , and his is a bit part . i always consider it an index of a movie's desperation when it is able to present shocking and outlandish events , and somehow not have them generate an ounce of impact . there is one scene -- a riot outside the courtroom -- that should have created incredible tension , but winds up playing out like a textbook exercise on how not to deploy a scene like this . because the movie doesn't know what it's really about , <NEG> it * can't * generate any genuine tension , and so it has to artifically inject tension through clumsy plotting </NEG> . one of the ways it does this is by throwing in a whole subplot about a bunch of vicious kkk cross-burners -- which is tidied up so neatly that it borders on the nihilistic . i was reminded of the despicable betrayed , which tried to tart up a fundamentally empty story by injecting vile , graphic acts of racism as little more than an attention-getter . the movie immolates an enormous amount of its potential by making a few critical mistakes . first of all , the jackson character is not hard to judge ; there's no tension in his dilemma . he's self-admittedly guilty and should be sent to jail , no matter how moral his crusade . the old saw about how no court in the land would convict him , if he was white , is supposed to be the underlying theme of the movie , but <NEG> it's never developed into an organic component of the story . it just sort of floats around on top while the movie grinds away furiously with its plot mechanics . another mistake is </NEG> in motivational logic : by not having the two white thugs arraigned first -- or maybe tried and then dismissed from lack of evidence , say -- we have that much less empathy for jackson's character . i'm probably supposed to think that just because he had his daughter raped , we are * automatically * supposed to feel empathy for him , but that's precisely the kind of facile thinking that makes real justice impossible . ( see the virgin spring for more on that note . ) is jackson's character then simply insane ? that prospect isn't given terribly serious treatment either . <NEG> one of the most aggravating things about coutroom movies is how little they seem to know </NEG> about how the law works , or how lawyers get their information . mcconaughey's character makes an important slipup late in the movie , when one of his witnesses turns out to have been convicted of a capital offense . how did the prosecution get this information ? how come he didn't get it ? the whole way these questions get handled are <NEG> symptomatic of the movie's way of dealing with complex legal and moral questions in cheap screenwriterly slam-bang fashion </NEG> . this is the biggest problem : the movie isn't about jackson's character , or his dilemma , or this case , or any of its ( frequently interesting despite the porcine writing and direction ) characters . it's not ultimately about anything at all , except its <NEG> stupid geared-down plot </NEG> , which inches onwards in <NEG> one unremarkable scene after another towards a totally contrived ending </NEG> . at two and a half hours , the movie is <NEG> overlong and drastically overwritten </NEG> : there's endless stuff about things which ultimately add up to nothing , and no writing about the material that should really matter . <NEG> it's all handwaving . the closing argument are also sneaky and underhanded , and underscored my suspicion that the movie is manipulative and unfair </NEG> . it's not easy to make a movie about something . the other day i saw kurosawa's phenomenal rashomon , a movie that is really about the way people deal with truth and reality ( or don't ) . a time to kill <NEG> is as empty and ponderous a movie as i've seen in a long time </NEG> .
