A TIME TO KILL (21)

Directed by: Joel Schumacher

Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Samuel L. Jackson, Sandra Bullock

The Pitch: A small-town lawyer in the Deep South takes on the case of a black man charged with murdering his daughter's white rapists.

Theo Sez: Never mind the others - this one is special! It may be the archetypal American 90s movie, at least in the way PEYTON PLACE is the ultimate text for the buttoned-up 50s or GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER for the Great Society 60s - big, dumb, terrible movies that manage to reflect an entire age, in all its idiocy. The fascinating thing about it isn't just how trendy it is, but how precisely trendy, as though it were all written after extensive market research on its audience's social attitudes and prejudices (why am I saying "as though"?). Thus old-style, KKK-flavoured Southern reactionarism is so discredited it can safely be demonised - psychotic rednecks against super-noble blacks - but the racially-charged politics of the NAACP are also out of fashion, and can not be endorsed, while on a controversial subject like the death penalty the characters (quite literally) argue passionately then agree to disagree - a dramatically pointless scene that exists only to align the movie with mid-90s America (just as Bullock's role exists only to suggest the possibility of extra-marital sex, before affirming family values). What's perhaps most astonishing is how extraordinarily crude and witless it is in terms of film-making, as if so much energy was spent trying to gauge the national mood there was none left over to make a decent movie. The narrative - especially in the later stages, when the whole South seems to be going up in flames - is just laughable, ending with the most incoherent trial in memory, the jury "identifying" with the defendant through our hero's lachrymose summing-up and thereby (!!!) finding him not guilty by reason of insanity (it eclipses even PRIMAL FEAR for sheer ludicrousness). Someone should really write an article on how chaotic celebrity trials, post-O.J., have destroyed film-makers' faith in courtroom drama - though, again, the film may in that respect be a fair reflection of America's belief that the Law breaks down, and emotions take over, when race rears its head. It's obviously unfair to blame the mirror for the shortcomings of the original, even when the result is as fascinatingly absurd as this; nonetheless, one can at least wonder why so many of the best actors in Hollywood chose to appear in such meretricious crud.