Samuel L Jackson: 5 Awesome Performances And 5 That Sucked

4. Carl Lee Hailey - A Time To Kill (1996)

One thing that Jackson's performances never lack (for the most part) is emotion - which has at times pushed him over the boundary into playing pantomime caricatures and building a presumably unwanted reputation for shouting in even the most unnecessary of situations. His take on Carl Lee Hailey, the Clanton, Mississippi resident whose daughter is brutally raped and almost murdered by a pair of young white racists, who unsuccessfully attempt to hang her is a mesmerising portrait of enraged grief and the explosive, inevitable reaction of an impotent, tragic figure pushed to the most extreme of actions. There was inevitably major opportunity for Jackson to grand-stand, and to take the chance of incredibly loaded material to overload his characterisation of Carl Lee, but the performance is far from a caricature of grief and socially propelled outrage. Before everything else, Jackson made Carl Lee a man, broken and bruised not only by the physical scars born by his daughter, but also by the anguish of realisation that the system would inevitably fail him, and that the assailants would inevitably walk free, without so much as a cursory intervention by real justice. The single most memorable moment of the entire film comes not when Matthew McConaughey's attourney offers the irresistible refrain of "now imagine she's white" that breaks the case; it happens immediately before that, when Jake visits Carl Lee in jail, and the latter devastatingly reveals the lawyer's own discrimination.