Good entertainment, stinky ideology
So, if I well understood, expeditive and instinctive justice won against objective investigations... Wow ! Pretty demagogic movie !
shareThe way I understood it is that white liberal guilt and the race card won over an open and shut case. The ending was just deserts for Bobby Earl.
shareI agree with the OP, this film is like a bad pro-death penalty advertising. I was just browsing the external reviews links, and I think Richard Scheib from Moria.co.nz says it far better than I could:
"Worse is the political subtext. At the beginning of the film, Sean Connery is put on the spot regarding his stance on the death penalty and asked if he would not want vengeance if his wife and daughter were threatened. The rest of Just Cause acts as a virtual descent into red-blooded vigilantism for Connery. His attempt to stop Blair Underwood going to the electric chair is entirely about him symbolically giving up such academically distant notions as the liberal justice system and having to learn at close quarters why the death penalty is justified. Expectedly his wife and daughter do get to be threatened and in very direct terms he is forced to stand up and defend them by killing. The whole film is really a pro-death penalty statement written in the crudest possible terms."
I'm reading the novel right now, and it's a far better work. For starters, the main character is just a journalist, not an anti-death penalty activist, and also we get some bad vibes from Bobby Earl right from the start. This two simple things manage to avoid what I feel are the film's worst mistakes, turning the whole plot into a discussion of death penalty (this is not "Dead man walking, just a popcorn flick) and cheating the audience regarding Bobby Earl.
When Connery gives that statement at the beginning of the movie in which he says clearly that he would not want to submit to the kind of justice that serial killers themselves live by, it's a perfectly reasonable idealogy, and one that too many films so often try to prove wrong.
So why does this movie disagree with him? Why does it try to prove him wrong, too?
Like A Time to Kill, this is another one of those crass movies made in 1995-1996 (in the wake of the O.J. Simpson trial) that was made purely to give dumbed-down audiences what they want: eye-for-an-eye justice. It's a real shame, too, because this movie has so many great things going for it: the top-notch performances by Connery, Fishburne, Capshaw and Harris; the surprisingly good direction by Arne Glimcher, and the crisp photography of the Deep South.
But I think what pisses me off the most about the movie is that it disregards the reasons as to WHY the Bobby Earl character does so much harm in the world (not to mention how his death at the end will matter to the Ruby Dee grandmother, who still loves him dearly) in favor of having him killed off quickly to satisfy moviegoers who want that pathetic rush that one gets from watching a villain get their just desserts. The movie also tries to make a case that torture and sheer inhumanity are acceptable--that it's okay for cops to torture their suspects into confessing a crime, or that it's okay for criminals to be castrated. That's disgusting.
"What I don't understand is how we're going to stay alive this winter."
Wrong, this movie was released in February 1995 and written in 1993-94, long before the OJ trial had concluded in October 1995. A Time to Kill is based off a book written in 1989.
shareYou know damn well you like seeing villains get their commeuppances.
shareI can't agree more. While the movie's entertainment value is high, it's dumb ideology is unsettling.
Toward it's end, I felt seriously misled, cheated. And angry about having voluntarily spent 102 minutes getting tricked.