10 Best Joel Schumacher Films
3. A Time To Kill
Sandwiched between his two glossy Batman movies is perhaps Schumacher’s most serious film. Based on the novel by John Grisham, A Time To Kill is a stifling courtroom drama which tries, for the most part successfully, to examine racial prejudices at the heart of America’s legal system.
After his young daughter is beaten and raped, Carl Lee Hailey (Samuel L. Jackson, rarely better) has little faith in his family’s ability to obtain a fair trial in small town Mississippi, so takes the law into his own hands, shooting the assailants in the courthouse. Attorney Jake Brigance (Matthew McConaughey) is brought in to defend the grieving father.
A splashy and sensational tale, this is bolstered by great performances across the board, with Sandra Bullock and Oliver Platt joining McConaughey’s legal team, and the always enjoyable Kurtwood Smith as a KKK leader.
The oppressive heat of the setting serves to ramp up the tension as Schumacher makes an admirable effort to examine the prejudicial environment Hailey finds himself fighting in, and against. Subtlety was never the director’s strong suit, but with a setting and subject as evocative as this, blunt force does the job well.