A Time to Kill

The part that always gets me is the final, emotionally charged monologue by Matthew McConaughey. It sends chills down my spine and Matthew should have won an Oscar for it. It's been a long time since I've rooted for anyone in a movie like I did for Samuel Jackson and his lawyer. (04/13/2003)

Joel Schumacher is a master of either strongly conflicting dramas or absolutely strange fantasies and anything else that is... weird. This means that one day, he shoots an absolutely amazing movie based on real-life events, but once he gets to a rather improbable and often fantastic story, he’s hopeless. Luckily, A Time To Kill is the first one of the two. What’s more, it’s based on a book, so it really can grab your attention for its lengthy 149 minutes. But that’s not only thanks to the director; Matthew McConaughey usurped a substantial part of the movie for himself. You could even say that it is literally his movie – even despite the fact that it’s basically his very first lead role that dazzled Hollywood. Hats off! I kind of feel like lawyer roles in movies predominantly about black people and racism somehow befit him. It’s not just a coincidence, right? (04/11/2014)

McConaughey was a good actor even when he was young, but he just didn’t want to. Schumacher in good form, a myriad of stars (Jack Bauer as the head of the local branch of the Ku Klux Klan!), who maintain the tension inside the viewer for two and a half hours until the unexpectedly classic end. Grisham came up with a great idea revolving around racial hatred, Goldsman interpreted it wonderfully for the silver screen. A classic about a lawyer that matures with age. (12/24/2014)

A traditional southern Grisham film based on the 1988 novel of the same name. The film is a riveting courtroom drama with many pressing themes that are conveyed with equal verve in both mediums. Of the performances, Matthew McConaughey towers above all, especially in the final speech. Samuel L. Jackson is also great, but Sandra Bullock is just a poster attraction - her role is relatively small and just completes the all-star team. (05/04/2022)

This time it's best to start from the end. The final and supposedly gripping and authentic speech by Matthew McConaughey left me completely indifferent. It's brutally implausible and it won’t make you transform into a gullible jury member, so unless you want to feel it at all cost, you won't feel anything. The chemistry between the young lawyer and the ambitious student is great and they complement each other well, Kevin Spacey delivers excellent wisecracks and the permanently “sozzled” Donald Sutherland plays a role that is not often seen. And we must not forget the main antagonist, whose revenge was much more believable than those legal entanglements. However, the biggest driving force remains the initial brutal act and the subsequent chaos in the bar. (10/27/2007)

Average, average, and more average. On the one hand, the great Samuel L. Jackson, the admirable "shark" Kevin Spacey, excellent (all of them) chilling scenes with the Ku Klux Klan and Goldenthal's chilling music along with them, but on the other hand we get Matthew McConaughey, who is not very believable, the completely unnecessary Sandra Bullock character (even more unnecessary than in the book), several downright ridiculous moments (the bomb, the shooting of the soldier...) and that sickeningly saccharine ending... Two and a half stars. (12/18/2011)

That's the beauty of those 90s movies, you get to watch a scene where a lawyer played by Kevin Spacey sinks a witness based on his 30-year-old rape accusation that took place on 9/11. At least there's some joy in this overwrought mess according to hypocrite-in-chief John Grisham. We can only envy the man's ability to calmly fight the death penalty furiously with his left hand and peck out a novel that defends it through enormous hyperbole, sadistic descriptions of crime, and appeals to the racial frictions of the American South with his right. The film treatment then doesn't problematize the novel at all, and on the contrary is almost completely faithful to it, with occasional bursts of Goldsman’s screenwriting flubs (the lawyer protagonist and his righteous fisticuffs, disastrous characterization scenes). McConaughey trying to play himself to death here at least recalls a time when he was a truly insufferable piece of slime. (01/13/2020)

It's a good movie and a strong case with great acting performances, although I still don't understand how it's possible to kill two people and walk out of the courtroom innocent, respectively without punishment. However, it rather made me reflect on the shape of justice, at least in the American system, where it's not about justice itself, but simply about the case, popularity, good reputation... I don't know, just about anything except justice. How should one actually perceive it? (06/09/2016)

Undoubtedly one of Joel Schumacher's best films, although it's fair to say that with John Grisham source material and a very good script by Akiva Goldsman, it couldn't have turned out any other way. A Time to Kill is a brilliant courtroom drama that manages to remarkably link the most serious individual crimes with the toxic and unrelenting interracial hatred in Mississippi and moreover put everything into the proper context. The sumptuous cast, ranging from the passionate (which is slightly unfair in the context of the plot, but I didn't mean it that way at first) idealist Matthew McConaughey to the endearingly proper Sandra Bullock to the slimy and implacable Kevin Spacey, is simply divine. They're all divine here though, including Samuel L. Jackson and Donald Sutherland. One of the top courtroom movies with an extremely evocative closing speech by a then twenty-seven year old Matthew McConaughey, for whom this was actually the first really major and character role in the true sense of the word. (08/17/2020)