| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Movie Name | Sling Blade (1996) |
| Director | Billy Bob Thornton |
| Writer | Billy Bob Thornton |
| Lead Actor | Billy Bob Thornton |
| Cast | Billy Bob Thornton, Dwight Yoakam, J.T. Walsh, Lucas Black, Natalie Canerday |
| Genre | Drama, Crime, Thriller |
| Release Date | August 2, 1996 (United States) |
| Duration | 2h 7m (127 min) |
| Budget | $1.2 million (approx.) |
| Language | English |
| IMDb Rating | 8.0/10 |
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Sling Blade
This Billy Bob Thornton project (he’s writer, director and star) came out of nowhere and shows that movies are far from safely predictable, once you escape the box-office obsession of the major studios. Thornton (previous scripts: One False Move, A Family Thing) takes a cliché figure the demented small-town bogeyman murderer and turns him into a hero.
Thornton plays Karl Childers, a semiretarded recluse in the Arkansas Bible Belt. Normally mild-mannered, despite being abused and neglected as a child, Karl has acted once in a moral fury to destroy his mother and her lover with a sling blade, a farm cutting tool. (He describes the event in a brilliant early monologue that wins audience understanding and sympathy.) After a quarter century of treatment, he’s considered cured and released.
Karl is, of course, “different” odd in speech and behavior, slow. He’s a little scary. We’re worried he’s not quite safe, but the first half of the film builds our confidence and fondness for him. He gets along well in his job as a gifted mechanic, and befriends a young boy (Lucas Black) and his widowed mom. The bad guy on the scene is Doyle (Dwight Yoakam), her boyfriend. He’s a drunken bigot who beats her and the boy.
The outcome is predictable Karl is motivated by his biblical concepts of justice and good and evil. As a story, Sling Blade leaves its audience satisfied. (None of the killings are actually seen on screen.)
The movie is much better as a study of people and a place than as moral philosophy. Karl is a notably bizarre creation likely to stick in our memories for a while, and the town is full of decent, three-dimensional characters who seem crafted from real life. Among them is John Ritter, in a novel portrayal of a sympathetic but far from perfect family friend who is homosexual. Well-crafted tale of back-country justice problem language, family conflict situations recommended for adults.
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