MovieChat Forums > Bully (2001) Discussion > Did the law really NEED to give them str...

Did the law really NEED to give them strong sentences for THAT?


Granted, they did indeed commit murder, and murder is against the law, but the person they killed was someone who was in more ways than one a horrible and truly evil human being. (And apparently according to the book and the true story on which the case was based, he was even worse in reality than he was portrayed as in the movie.)

Given how he constantly humiliated and 'bullied' (hence the title) his arguably "best friend" by constantly hitting him physically and subjecting him to verbal abuse and other manner of hurtful insults that would try a Saint's patience for crying out loud, given how he r*ped/s**ually assaulted at least two young girls (if not more) that would even and rightfully so put him in jail and cause many civilized people to turn away from him, how he allegedly assaulted and apparently nearly killed a few people himself apparently based on what we have heard about him and whatnot...

Why would the LAW be so harsh and punitive as to jail all those men (and women too, Gawd!) for killing him for tens of decades if not for a lifetime and even for a death penalty, given how often police themselves often kill innocent people and get away with it, politicians who killed millions didn't get into any trouble due to power (yeah, our world is so civilized, NOT!) but most importantly, the person they killed was a dangerous and harmful human being himself, so they could at least have given them reduced sentence due to the nature of the crime and not life imprisonment as such, I mean, I could MAYBE understand them receiving a death sentence or a life imprisonment IF say, though God FORBID, if he even DOES exist, in the process of killing him, they shot at a crowd and killed numerous INNOCENT people AS WELL, but that (fortunately) DIDN'T happen, and I wish law ANYWHERE was FAR more civilized in the sense that it didn't punish so severely for killing BAD GUYS.

Yes, I know the law is the law, but it wasn't set in stone for crying out loud, and yet in some places (let's not go TOO much into the gruesome details here though we all know how unfathomably shocking it all of course REALLY is) it is like perfectly legal (and society has NO power WHATSOEVER to alter it, not even a strict grandmother could protest and beat the conscience into these people) to kill and hurt people for things that are not even a crime or all that bad, like wives cheating on their husbands, why don't those people gain some empathy and conscience to kill BAD people INSTEAD if they want to act in a vigilante style for what they believe is "right"? Life makes no sense whatsoever man!

And what if law as such DIDN'T exist and acted in a different way, like, would it be CIVILIZED to let those people get away with killing him then?

And on a slightly different side, did the movie mean to say that, BESIDES legal implications of course, even if he WAS a despicable character in the end, those young men and women were STILL wrong to kill him and do so brutally like that? (Ah, but if just ONE of them SHOT him in the head instead, think of how much legal trouble those other people would've damn avoided.)

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The slutty sexy girl got 40 years , according to the content of the movie it is incomprehensible because she didn't do anything, no stabbing no hitting ; i'll watch a documentary about the real story.

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So in a way...

The law wasn't entirely fair on them but they did I suppose deserve some legal punishment for it, correct?

P.S. What if law didn't exist? Or rather - it didn't exist in ways it does today but perhaps it operated on different levels? Non-human animals don't have laws (this isn't trolling) but we do cause we created them, how would say this scenario come across and would it be fair or...?

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There is no credible evidence that Bobby Kent was a brutish thug Larry Clark and Jim Schutze made him out to be, other than what Marty and his friends said. Since dead people can't defend themselves, we will never know the truth, but it seems very likely that Bobby Kent, even if he was "a bad seed", was nowhere near as bad as he was portrayed in the book and in this movie.

But even if he was really a cruel bully, he still did not deserve to be killed in such a brutal way. They could have stopped hanging out with him or maybe even report him to the authorities instead of resorting to murder.

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