Billy Bob Thornton's Karl -- a borderline moron released from a mental institution twenty-five years after murdering his mother and her lover -- is a striking portrait, difficult to recognize as the same man who, for instance, was once the bullying cardsharp faced down by an unarmed Wyatt Earp in Tombstone: "Are you gonna do something, or are you just gonna stand there and bleed?" That man. The makeover is top to bottom. To begin with, there's the neo-Medieval bowl haircut and the unchanging costume of gray shirt buttoned up to the neck and blue pants stopping a couple of inches short of the ankle. Then there's the pugnaciously outthrust chin and the lips drawn taut into a chimplike grin. And then there's the Southern drawl lowered an octave or two so as to sound something like Froggy of the "Our Gang" comedies after his pubertal voice-change, something like a dubbed Italian muscleman grunting with the effort to topple a pillar or roll a boulder, something like the grinding gears of an eighteen-wheel semi on a steep downgrade. This frightful growl is punctuated at intervals with a throat-clearing "mmm-hmm" or, less affirmatively, more ruminatively, a mere "mmm." All of which is quite fascinatingly and entertainingly original, but at the same time is too much of a stunt to be taken entirely seriously. The humor and pathos around this character (e.g., his habit of standing outside a door without either entering or knocking, just waiting to be found there) are really pretty easy to come by; and Thornton, who also wrote and directed, comes by them in bucketfuls. The central situation -- the befriending of Karl by a young boy whose single mother is victimized by an abusive lover -- is dripping with sentimentality. The writing often sounds a lot like overwriting -- stilted and literary. The directing, even more often, looks a lot like underdirecting -- a dimly illuminated image and a disinterested camera disposed toward time-saving and money-saving long takes. Still, a sufficiently likable little movie, notwithstanding the two-and-a-quarter-hour duration that taxes the boundaries of littleness. With Lucas Black, Natalie Canerday, John Ritter, Dwight Yoakam. (1997) — Duncan Shepherd