Many people think that Rosa Parks was to first to sit at the front of the bus all those years ago in 1955. In fact, two other women had sat on the front of the bus and refused to get up before Rosa Parks. The problem is that one of those women was a pregnant teenager while the other was also less than the ideal poster child for a movement. A bus boycott and a cry for civil rights wasn't going to have the same impact if the impetus behind it was a person of less than stellar character. They needed a Mary Sue.

In the movie "The Accused" Sarah Tobias (Jodie Foster) was no Mary Sue. She was far from it, but that was not a justification for rape and the peanut galleryism that accompanied it.

Rightly or wrongly, in this society there are such things as good rape victims (meaning easy to prosecute the rapists) and bad rape victims (meaning difficult to prosecute the rapists). The good rape victim is one who is a conservatively dressed strait-laced woman minding her own business. A bad rape victim is a sexily dressed promiscuous woman prone to drinking and/or drugs and behaving in a provocative way. Sarah Tobias was a bad rape victim.

She was sending all the signals that a lascivious man would need to act upon his lusts. She was scantily clad, entertaining the come-ons, giggling at everything the man said, smoking pot, drinking alcohol, and to top it all off she did a sexy dance routine when no one else was on the dance floor. In the mind of the guy with no self-control: "she was asking for it." Whatever he, or anyone else, thought she was "asking for," she wasn't asking to be choked, pinned down, and forcibly raped by three men on a pinball machine. Only in the most depraved society would a woman be "asking" for that.

"The Accused" is a gutsy film that punches you in the gut. It equally tests your dedication to justice for Sarah and your despise of her actions leading up to the rape. "The Accused" doesn't hold back anything. It shows all the less than discretionary behavior of Sarah Tobias which makes you want to slap some sense into her at least. And it shows the despicably loathsome behavior of the rapists that make you want to protect Sarah and serve up some medieval style justice to her rapists. No, you are not spared. You will have to confront your feelings about the entire situation. And whether you feel comfortable about yourself and your opinions afterward or not, you will have some concrete thoughts and opinions.

It is very hard watching this movie because it is such a shocking story. A girl is gang raped by 3 men in a bar, where a crowd of male customers are shouting, clapping and cheering it on like it's a show.

Jodie Foster plays Sarah Tobias, the girl who is raped. She is not shown as this good virgin but someone who has made mistakes in the past and on the night she was raped but in no way deserved what happened to her. It is shown that before she was raped, she was drunk, had smoked pot, flirted with the men and even made a joke about taking one of them back to her trailer and sleeping with him in front of her boyfriend's face. It must have been a very demanding role for Jodie Foster to do, especially near the end of the film where we see a flashback of the rape and it is very realistic and goes a lot further than any other films about rape has. It must have been very hard for Jodie to do that sequence most of all. She is totally amazing in this role where her character comes across as tough but has a vulnerable side and doesn't have anyone to look out for her until Kathryn Murphy (Kelly McGillis) comes into her life.

Kelly McGillis does start off as cool but as the story goes on, we see a compassionate woman who wants to stand up for Sarah's rights and wants to right the wrong she did when she accepted a plea bargain for the charge of reckless endangerment with Sarah's rapists. She then decides the only way she can make up for it, is to prosecute the men who egged the rapists on and feels she can prosecute them using the charge of criminal solicitation which means the rapists will stay in jail for the whole sentence.

I liked the relationship between McGillis and Foster who are completely different people. Sarah is more loose, she's been arrested for drugs in the past, she smokes pot and drinks, she lives in a trailer park and is into astrology. Kathryn, on the other hand, comes across as squeaky clean, a goody-two shoes, conservative, educated in Law school, and is very middle-class. You wouldn't think these two could ever bond but they do over this case and end up caring for one another in a way neither thought they would.

The film is very graphic and leaves nothing to the imagination in the rape sequence and the language that is used. The language during the rape when the crowd is shouting 'Hold her down', 'needle-dick', 'poke that pussy' is very colourful and cruel. It shows these men have a total disregard of the feelings for women, particularly the callous way they talk about the rape as being a show Sarah put on and the rapists were only following her actions and don't have any reason to feel guilty for what they did to her.

It is a difficult film to watch but when the film ends, you have a positive feeling that justice has been served as the men who egged on the rape are just as bad and guilty as the rapists.