Reaction to Sling Blade

Sling Blade; what a movie! I've seen this movie more than once, and I will probably see it many times more in the near future. I have this movie on DVD, and I must admit that I love it a lot. The first time I saw it was back in 1998. I had no idea who Billy Bob Thornton was back then, but I was very interested in this movie. I saw it on a shelf in Wal-Mart and began to read the back cover of it. It piqued my interest, so I purchased it.

The first time I watched this movie, I cried like a baby. It broke my heart to know that a parent and other people would use, abuse, and mistreat someone in Karl's condition. Everyone knew that he was mentally challenged, but it still did not stop some people from just being down-right mean to him.

Karl Childers was a man who did not mean anyone any real harm. All he wanted was to be left alone to do what he wanted, which was mostly to fix on broken motors and such. He loved French fries and biscuits with mustard. He also loved to do one other thing that no one seemed to notice or care about. He loved to protect the innocent. This man went out of his way to protect someone he thought or knew that needed it, and he never complained about what the consequences were after the action was done. He loved children, and he was very protective of them.

I know that this is not supposed to be a paper summarizing the movie, but I wanted to say the above stated paragraph about the movie in my own words. That is the type of man that I felt Karl was, and my heart went out to him throughout the entire movie. I don't think that he was treated fairly by everyone in his town, and I don't like the way that he was made to pay for what he did as a child. Why would someone take an innocent child who was only trying to protect his mother and lock him up for 25 years? Where is the justice in that? Additionally, why did his mother not try to be a better parent to him? I believe with just a little love and support from her, Karl would have turned out to be a different person. He might have even figured out, with his mother's help of course, that killing is not the only way to help someone. It broke my heart to know that as a child, Karl went through more hard times and troubles than some people go through in an entire lifetime. It was not right for him to have to sleep in shed on the cold, hard ground, and it was not right for his mother to allow someone other than herself