The adaptation of the earliest and not least ambitious John Grisham potboiler, about a Mississippi black man on trial for the double murder of his ten-year-old daughter's rapists, bundles up the author's fairy-tale articles of faith (the luck of the beginner, the ascension of the underdog, the might of right) and sets them down in a vast and volatile social arena (the racial divide, the persistence of the KKK, the most piggish assembly of white-trash bigots on screen since the heyday of Don Stroud and Anthony Zerbe), where the simple-mindedness and smugness of them go beyond minor irritations into major embarrassments. Joel Schumacher's connect-the-dots and dot-the-i's direction (when the defense attorney completes the phrase "After they killed her tiny womb...," the director cuts to a female juror knitting her brows) further dilutes any complexity. Some good acting, in spite of everything, from Samuel L. Jackson, Ashley Judd, Brenda Fricker, Kevin Spacey, Patrick McGoohan, Charles S. Dutton, Chris Cooper. Some cloying ingratiation from Matthew McConaughey in the lead role, Sandra Bullock in the second lead, and Oliver Platt just behind in the role of comic-relief sidekick. Some uniquely questionable casting whereby Donald and Kiefer Sutherland are placed in the same movie as, respectively, a disbarred liberal attorney and an unrelated redneck dirtball. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd
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