Rating: 8/10
Dir: James Sadwith
Star: Brian Dennehy, Cloris Leachman, Marcia Gay Harden, Chris Cooper
[10] Supposedly based on fact, this film neatly reverses the “one vigilante against a million scum” theme, by having an entire town take on one redneck after his assault on a shopkeeper seems to be going unpunished by the law, thanks to legal legerdemain. This provides 80 or so minutes of highly effective menace, courtesy of Dennehy as the villain, definitely not the sort of guy you’d want to meet down any alley, dark or otherwise.
That’s really about it; a long, slow-burning fuse, with more a whimper than a bang at the end. Such is the price of docudrama, since the same can probably be said for most of real life itself (even when transformed into cinema). Still, Dennehy delivers enough frisson to carry the film as a whole, even if it all feels not unlike a TV movie, albeit a grimy, well-done one.