The interminable civil rights drama “Blood Done Sign My Name” rolls out stiff clichés to tell a familiar story of racial injustice in the South.
Depicting real people and events that took place in Oxford, NC, in 1970, the movie takes its time setting up the parallel lives of a racially enlightened preacher (Rick Schroder) and a black English teacher (Nate Parker). The latter turns out to be peripheral — and the former irrelevant — to the main action: the lynching of an innocent black man by a mob of whites.
The movie punches up the kinds of scenes you’ve seen done better 100 other times — church sermons, a sham trial, a Klan meeting. It gets bogged down in a lengthy funeral oration and a peace march, both of which are poorly paced and take us away from the central plot. An implied debate about the merits of peaceful protest versus riots and Black Panther-style radicalism is never developed in any serious way: The movie presents an arson attack on a tobacco warehouse as an unalloyed good.
The Schroder character and his family are strictly bystanders and shouldn’t even be in the movie. Their presence is finally explained when the closing credits reveal the story came from a book by the pastor’s son, who evidently thought his upbringing constituted a real-life “To Kill a Mockingbird.” But the suggestion that a heinous killing supplied a useful lesson about racism to a little white kid is pure bathos.