It's a bird, it's a plane, it's... Superdad!

Rating: Null/10 (15 November 2004)

This film may have been great once, but today it feels rather dated.
Sure enough, the film looks and sounds great even by today's standards. It has a sort of fairy-tale feel to it, which is also pretty nice, but it's essentially a 1½ hour kids film with 30 minutes of courtroom drama oddly spliced in there. Therefore, I can't help but feel that the story and the way people act turns very naive at times (Little girl to angry lynch mob: Please, don't be mean! Angry lynch mob: Well... alright then.).
And while the movie deals with racism, it does so with such stereotypes that it looses the edge. The blacks are humble good people (saved only by the grace of white super-dad Peck), and the most whites are a bunch of snarling rednecks.
The kids are surprisingly good actors, and Dill may be one of the coolest kids I've seen on film, but after an hour of them running around playing, you grow tired of it. Peck (as the best, most caring, fantastic single parent in history) does one of those performances that you're supposed to really admire, but I think it's pretty stiff and stilted.
Overall, it's good in parts, but it lacks that "something special" that can turn it into a classic. [4/10]