A Time to Kill

Joel Schumacher’s outrageous visual stylings from Batman Forever retreat very far into the background while Schumacher calms down heavily to take on the adaptation of John Grisham’s first novel, A Time to Kill. Taking a moral quandary and playing it out in the legal sphere, the film ends up feeling like The Client in the end but in a different direction: overly melodramatic instead of keeping its feet firmly planted in the very well-constructed legal reality that Grisham, Akiva Goldsman, and...