Emmet Walsh, Charles Dutton, Brenda Fricker. Even down on the third echelon the players are still hot: M. The rest of the rangy cast reads like a talent devotee wish-list: Kevin Spacey smarming away as the egotistical prosecutor Ashley Judd as the fretting wife Donald Sutherland the drunken old-timer with sly advice and Oliver Platt providing comic asides as a cynicism-sodden buddy lawyer. And enter hotshot law student Sandra Bullock to boil up some serious sexual chemistry and add right-on viewpoints. Enter the Ku Klux Klan, led by the sneering lustre of Kiefer Sutherland, to stir up the locals, propping up the thriller elements with top quality nastiness. It is, of course, Brigance who elects to defend his vigilante actions and blow issues of justice wide open. After two redneck bullyboys brutally rape his black eight-year-old daughter and then slip through a hole in the law, impassioned father Jackson dispenses home-made justice by a lethal injection. Unknown beforehand but now a superstar in the offing, McConaughey is Jake Brigance, the local boy lawyer embroiled in a case that is more akin to a legal firebomb. This is easily the most thought-provoking and stimulating of the Grishamised movies. Yet bad karma has led to enriched moviegoing. It proved less a gift than a hot potato: a moral tightrope of a subject, casting antipathy between director and author (over who would play the lead) and a shoot in the inflammatory and sweltering atmosphere of a Mississippi summer haunted by the ghosts of movies past - To Kill A Mockingbird casts a long shadow. By far his best work, A Time To Kill carried semi-autobiographical overtones that the scribe (and, now indeed, producer) had, fearing the worst, been unwilling to fritter off onto the Hollywood production line. So enamoured was he with Joel Schumacher's solid if unremarkable handling of The Client, that one-time legal eagle turned author-of-the-moment John Grisham handed the director the reins to his precious debut novel.
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