Watch The Trial of Billy Jack For Free

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Good movie but grossly overrated

Better Late Then Never

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

When I was in graduate school, one of my fellow grad students reviewed this for the college newspaper. He tore it to pieces. You should have heard the anger from the student population. They accused him of being insensitive to the Native American population and wanted his hide. My friend was a serious student and didn't take opinions lightly. It turns out, he was reviewing one of the worst movies ever made. I don't remember much about the first one, but I guess it had some decent parts to it. This is a worthless sequel which attempts to profit on the original's popularity.

I finally broke down and watched the 1971 film a few days ago. I'm old enough where I remember these films (but was too young to see them... I SWEAR they were "R"s on release), which mostly played back to back at the drive-ins and also remember the relentless parodies in the early days of SNL.Shockingly, the 1971 film isn't horrible, it's really kind of good. It has heart and the basic structure of a good old schlocky Walking Tall semi-grindhouse picture. It's wildly dated, yet it's hard not to feel a touch of admiration at the spirit shown by Laughlin and Taylor (Taylor even acts fairly well in the '71 film), even when the filmmakers are so obviously out of their depths in virtually every technical department. "Billy Jack" has the weirdly contagious feel of an improvised film, which it sounds like it almost was.By contrast, The Trial of Billy Jack is every bit as bad as you've heard it is... a completely unwatchable vanity picture and an monumentally poor one at that. Since the core cast and the Christinas (helming the "script") stayed the same, one can only determine the bulk of the failure lies with the director, and that's "director" in title-only. Don't think for a minute that anyone had control of this chaotic jaw-dropping idiotic free-for-all.From camping Billy up as a Christ figure, complete with Jesus and Judas in a test in the desert, to bad Kung Fu parodies with wack "effects" that could have been made by shining a Lite Bright into the lens (now you know I'm old) to Laughlin and Taylor having basically the same exchange 50 times ("Damn it Billy, when are you going to learn?" "Aw shucks Jean, what choice do I have?") to Laughlin's over-the-top mind-numbing "gloating" before he "gets physical" with the baddies... all in slow motion.... they literally stand still waiting to be pulverized... to the simply god-awful 3 hour run time (of which 2 hours could easily have been cut) you can't get a better example of how NOT to make a movie.This was no labor of love.... just one of insanity. Your pet guinea pig could make a more coherent film, and one you'd be able to sit through without that required fast-forward button.

The views stated in this film are so unrealistic it hardly deserves the rating it has gotten, so much most of the commentary from the other reviewers on this website. I wasn't even alive or born in the era it was created, but even an elementary school drop-out can tell what is wrong with this picture and question some of the most ham-fisted script work, direction, and cast of characters ever put on film. There have been worse films made since the birth of Hollywood, from prominent directors to the indie scene, and frankly I'm inclined to say this ranks amongst the Top 10 of some of the worst. If not the Top 10, then all three deserve to be in the Top 20.I choose the second film first of the group because it displays such a lopsided view of reality. In what is said to be an 'expose' of the "corrupt" people around us we are instead given a three-hour preach song and dance which force-feeds it's overall goal rather than raise the bar as far as 'provocative' films go. In all of Laughlin's films we are told that all white people are evil, that the Native Americans are pathetic creatures always getting the short end of the stick, that the President and the government are so gosh-darned evil that they would want to tap into the phone lines of seemingly innocent flower power girls and guys. Rather amusingly, apparently Billy Jack is constantly referred to as a 'dirty in-jun' despite the fact that one could've easily mistaken him for an extra from a long-forgotten episode of TV's "Bonanza". The fact that these themes are evident frequently in all three of his films makes me question the family's sanity; the only good decision I've seen so far in this film were the opening shots of the prairie.The film borderlines stupidity in which the teens or children in question decide to create some "almighty lie detector" which can tell whether or not people on the media are lying. I'm sorry, but at that point, all motivation to take the film at face value has been lost. In trying to fight against a supposed 'agenda' the film has inadvertently started preaching it's own agenda. Thankfully, films made long after this one have learned not to treat the subject matters at hand with such stupid insecurities and lopsided twists. Things like having the Freedom School destroyed and attacked, children with bunnies being shot, make the film unintentionally funny and in my eyes - lazy.I find it ridiculous to believe that 'The Man' in this film, be it Washington, the National Guard, or the Army, would constantly go out and kill people or attack certain individuals without remorse and sweep things under the rug as is implied in this film. As a result, the cards are stacked too high and I'm being forced to believe that through the power of really awfully sung folk songs and a one-man killing machine is going to put down his detractors. This is supposed to be a movie in which to tell me that 'non-violent' means of getting a point across and wit, savvy, will triumph in the end. Not the case here: I have to be barefoot and were tight-fitting jeans with a goofy looking black hat.The acting is awful, the singing is horrendous, and if the DVD commentary is to be believed that Laughlin and his family didn't know what they were doing, then I guess the majority of you can see why we hate this film. By comparison to Rambo, a far superior soldier who underwent far worse conditions in the same war and location, Billy Jack comes off as a very hypocritical, stupid character and more like a fan-fiction "self-insertion" of the director.

**SPOILERS** With the earth-shaking success of his last film "Billy Jack" that took in an astounding 35 million in ticket sales in the box office, compared to the $500,000.00 that it took him to produced, Tom Laughlin-who played the fearless and sh*t-kicking half Indian half Irishman Green Beret hero in the film- was more then eager to follow up that movie with a sequel.Having Billy arrested and brought to trial for the karate kicking death of Bernard Rosner in "Billy Jack" it was a given that a film had to be made, the public demanded it, of Billy's trial and how he handles himself on the stand like he did handling the bad guys in the movie. Sad to say the 170 minute movie "The Trial of Billy Jack" was not really about his trial, that lasted no more then ten minutes of screen time, but the suffering of Billy's girlfriend Jean Roberts, Delores Taylor. It was Jean together with some 50 students of her government funded Freedom School who was gunned down by a bunch of trigger happy national guardsmen in a Kent State-like massacre in them being mistaken for being a gang of home grown terrorists and drug crazed, on pot, hippies. Almost the entire film is told in flashback by a crippled Jean in her hospital bed in how a series of tragic events lead to the school massacre that she's a survivor of.Having been released from prison after serving five years for involuntary manslaughter, the justifiable death of Bernard Rosner, Billy is back in town, or on the Indian reservation, and with a new outlook on life. Going into the mountains to have his soul cleansed of all impurities like violence and revenge Billy hopes to become a true Christ-like pacifist and man of love where his ability and skills of the martial arts would no longer be useful, or beneficial, to him. In that Billy Jack's film success is based on his sh*t kicking abilities not his turn the other cheek pacifism you know that his peaceful and passive outlook on life, as well as his and the Freedom School's enemies, wouldn't last too long!It's when Jean's students start to expose local as well as national, from the president on down, crooked politicians and their big business supporters with a serious of scorching exposes on the students-run TV station that those who run the country, and our lives, decide to put their foot down; On Jean's and her student's necks. Using a bunch of paid off American Indian leaders to sell their people out, by signing away their land rights, the late Bernard's father Mr. Posner, Riley Hill, who runs to state bank has Jean and her students threatened and harassed at every turn in having their precious Freedom School taken away from them. It's when Posner & Co. try to take over the secrete Indian Land adjutant to the Freedom School, as well as the school itself, that Billy who's been in deep meditation with his both dead as well as live Indian ancestors, as well as his deep inner self, comes on the scene.It's after a series of minor attacks on Jean and the Freedom school, like the bombing the TV station, that Rosner and his goons decide to go full tilt and finally put an end to the school's activities once and for all. That's In the schools, through a series of scorching exposes, exposing Rosner and his fellow crook's crimes against the Amerian Indians, as well as the American people. Rosner & Co. being totally unsuccessfully in putting Jean and her Freedom School out of business now plans to have the state and federal government do their dirty work for them.Nowhere as good as the previous Billy Jack movies, "Born Losers" & "Billy Jack", the film "The Trial of Billy Jack" despite it's marathon-like screen time, a world-class marathon runner runs that race faster then the length of the movie, it's not at all boring. What really spoiled the movie for me is that I expected, but knowing better, Billy to throw off his violent past and become a true man of the spirits where violence would be the absolute last thing on his mind. The fact that Billy was so eager to use his fists and feet instead of his spiritual attributes, as a peaceful and environmentally conscious American Indian, made him no better then the violent and mindless brutes that confronted him in the movie!P.S The movie had Billy Jack at his trial bring out how the infamous Lt. Calley's Mi Lie massacre of some 300 Vietnamese villagers was covered up by the then President of the United States Richard Nixon. The fact is that the Mi Lie massacre happened on March 16, 1968 when at the time Lyndon Johnson, not Nixon, was President.