A Time to Kill - review

Based on a novel by John Grisham, Samuel L Jackson & Matthew McConaughey both deliver outstanding performances in this powerful and emotive drama of when sometimes the wrong thing is the right thing to do.

In 1990’s America Carl Lee Haley is a ground-worker who when his 10 year old daughter is raped and badly beaten by 2 local lads in the southern state of Mississippi, takes the law into his own hands and kills them. With the town shocked at both crimes, Carl Lee is swiftly arrested and asks for the services of struggling attorney John Riddance who he spoke to before committing the offence.

With no doubt Carl Lee committed murder, John faces a challenge as Carl Lee asks him to represent him to persuade the jury that he killed the lads due to the trauma of what happened to his daughter and although he knows it won’t be an easy case, John agrees to take it on.

As John starts work on the case he knows will take a lot of work, law student Ellen Roark offers her help and together they work on putting forward an insanity plea, but with news of Carl Lee fighting the charges against him, friends of the murdered pair decide to revive the Klu Klux Klan in order to bring justice to the town and set about targeting those closest to the case, including the family of John Riddance.

With his family at risk, John is begged to drop the case but even after his house is burnt down he is determined to carry on as far as he can in his fight for justice, to prove that while Carl Lee purposely ended 2 lives, his reasoning for doing so should be taken into consideration.

But when his request for the trial to be moved to a more integrated town is denied and the odds begin to stack against him, John knows that to have a chance of winning his case, he needs to think along the lines of those against Carl Lee in order to win over the jury.

Set in a time and place when racial segregation and racism was still prominent, this movie didn’t hold back on such a sensitive subject to try and show that while murder is never the right thing to do, sometimes – no matter how hard it is to accept – there can be A Time to Kill.