n A TIME TO KILL (rental, cert 15)
That reliable old warhorse, the courtroom drama, is the subject of Joel Schumacher's ruthlessly manipulative (always bear in mind that this is the guy who directed the sobfest Ghost) wither-wringer, a movie that cutely plays its politics both ways by making its hero not only a outraged father who takes the law into his own hands and wastes a couple of bad guys - which gets the right-wing vote - but a black man whose victims are a pair of racist rednecks and who therefore becomes a major-league hate figure for white supremacists - which gets the liberal vote. That's showbiz at its best: something for everyone.
Here's the scenario: a 10-year-old girl is raped by a pair of good-ole-boy truckers down Mississippi way, and her father - good old Samuel L Jackson of Pulp Fiction fame, radiating dignity and integrity from every pore - ups and slays the guilty parties before they can get to trial, thus making himself eligible for a first-degree-murder rap and a date with whatever kind and usual (as opposed to cruel and unusual, which is forbidden by the Constitution) form of the death penalty they're currently operating for uppity nigras down in the land of cotton.
What with the cold-blooded nature of the deed, the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in the mood for a necktie party, and the prosecuting attorney being Kevin Spacey in maximum-meanness mode, our Sam looks to be right behind the eight ball until that other statutory courtroom-drama character, the washed-up defence lawyer, turns up in in the haggard and woebegone shape of young Matthew McConaughey.
From here on in the shape of the drama is fairly predictable, although the plot points have a few surprises to spring, and the result is a speedy, clever, and modestly entertaining legal suspenser with a fairly ruthless attitude to pushing the audience's buttons. Twelve Angry Men or To Kill A Mockingbird it ain't, but at least it's a proper movie rather than a big-budget demolition derby, which these days is enough to make us grateful.
n THE DIRTY DOZEN; ATTACK!; A BRIDGE TOO FAR; GO TELL THE SPARTANS (all retail, #5.99 each)
A cracking package of cut-price war movie re-releases from Warner Video, headed up by Robert Aldrich's immortal suicide-mission yarn about a bunch of military reprobates (Charles Bronson, Donald Sutherland, George Kennedy, Telly Savalas, etc) who are offered a reprieve from jail or execution to go and bump off a bunch of high-ranking Nazi staff officers.
This film has a fond place in my heart if only for the fact that on its first run in Glasgow it was up against The Sound Of Music at the box office - and beat it hands down, which is why Glasgow is my kinda town. The big discovery of the bunch, though, is Ted Post's early (set in 1964) Vietnam drama Go Tell The Spartans, starring Burt Lancaster as a tough old veteran trying to rescue his squad of rookie ''military advisers'' from a Vietcong ambush. Brutal, melancholy stuff, up there with Paths Of Glory as one of the great war-is-hell movies.
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