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A Time to Kill

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  • Americans Hate Tingle: As noted below under Values Dissonance, the film was far more controversial in France than in the US. While Americans embraced it as a film about a well-meaning man going outside the law to right a racist wrong done to his daughter, French critics condemned it as a glorification of vigilante violence. Its French distributor even gave it a Questioning Title? (Le Droit de tuer?) to make its morality seem more ambiguous than it was.
  • Cry for the Devil: The pro-Klan characters attempt to invoke this (albeit only amongst each other), claiming that the Klan is the only hope they have against black vigilantes. Whether that sentiment is at least sympathized with by members of the audience is certainly a controversial matter.
  • Designated Hero: While Carl Lee's motives are sympathetic, he did still commit murder with full awareness of what he was doing. Brigance knows his client is fully culpable but defends him on the grounds of insanity and by appealing heavily to emotion. Both have sympathetic motives, but the film skirts away from their moral grayness by making the victims and their defenders as straightforwardly evil as possible, to the point of portraying vigilantism as justified.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: In the movie, the DA played by Kevin Spacey castigates a defense witness for having been a statutory rapist. After October 2017, when Spacey himself was accused by at least sixteen other people of sexual misconduct, this scene feels absurd in the worst way. Likewise, Doug Hutchison portraying a rapist in this movie became this with his controversial marriage to and grooming of model Courtney Stodden. 
  • He Really Can Act: Matthew McConaughey shows remarkable depth and assurance as Jake Brigance and effortlessly holds his own against a cast of veterans. He had a slump since only doing comedies going into the 2000s but his mature Career Resurrection 17 years later, capped with an Best Actor Oscar, showed that his win was no fluke. 
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • Ellen Roark is a law student at Ole Miss, which is also the alma mater of Leigh Anne Tuohy, and both women are played by Sandra Bullock. Even more remarkable because Bullock is from Virginia, not Mississippi.
    • Roark is referred to as "Lois Lane" at one point in the movie. A decade after this film's release, Kevin Spacey would portray Lex Luthor in Superman Returns.
  • Just Here for Godzilla: While the film remains quite controversial, for some it's still more than worth it for main leads performances, ESPECIALLY Samuel L. Jackson's for the reason already explained below.
  • Memetic Mutation: "YES, X DESERVED TO DIE, AND I HOPE X BURN(S) IN HELL!" It's even odds that a parody of any Samuel L. Jackson character will shout the line at some point.
  • Moral Event Horizon: Billy Ray Cobb and Pete Willard initially just seem like run of the mill bigoted assholes at the very beginning of the film. They firmly cross the line into being irredeemable with their rape of the ten-year-old Tonya both In-Universe and out. The film and protagonists uses this horrible crime to portray them as Asshole Victims deserving of vigilante execution, and given Billy Ray's total lack of remorse it's hard to pity them.
  • Nightmare Fuel: The rape of 10-year-old Tonya Hailey. Even though we don't see all that much, what we are shown and told is horrifying enough. Even worse, it's all toned down from its counterpart in the book.
  • One-Scene Wonder:
    • Chris Cooper as the deputy who lost his leg in the attack, but holds no ill will and even calls Carl Lee a hero.
    • Nicky Katt only has three scenes as Billy Ray Cobb before the character's death, and doesn't have any lines in the third. He still gives a memorably loathsome performance in that time.
  • Retroactive Recognition: That's Octavia Spencer as Ellen's nurse.
  • Strawman Has a Point:
  • Unintentional Period Piece: The book actually became one while it was being written, as it was made illegal to use peremptory objections to jurors to remove every member of a particular race without explanation. The film had to be made a period piece to accommodate this.
  • Values Dissonance:
    • This film sparked controversy in many European countries regarding the death penalty and the right of self-defense. The nation where the most cries of outrage came from were from France. French critics accused it of being "nauseating", "stinking", and in the most extreme cases claimed it promoted fascism, the last of which is ironic considering that the film won an award from the NAACP.note 
    • The film was covered by the political podcast Unclear and Present Danger. It noted that a lot of the film's politics - such as portraying racism as a hold-out in only a few rural areas, and depicting civil rights activists as bad faith extremists - firmly mark the film as being made in the 1990s, though both said the film was still quite entertaining.

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