Women impotent and helpless in this movie?/Bad plot

Rating: Null/10 (2 October 2004)

If I were a woman watching this film, I would be offended. It portrays women (i.e. - Marcia Gay Harden) as being helpless, confused and willing to go along with whatever their husbands say. True, maybe her character was frightened, but if she thought he wasn't the murderer, why did she play dumb with the police?
And what was with Sean Penn's wife telling him it was OK to be a murderer at the very end? She was nobody during the movie, then all of a sudden her character appears at the end! She doesn't care about him wasting one of his childhood friends? Obviously, she goes along with whatever he does. Maybe this is true to life (murderers' girlfriends think they can do no wrong), but why does Hollywood perpetuate the "helpless woman" stereotype?? Are there no women offended by this movie???
My other problem with this movie: the whole thing about the police thinking Dave was the murderer. Get real -- this is the 21st Century and we have DNA evidence! Any policeman/prosecutor worth his salt would have run DNA tests on the blood found in Dave's car to see if it matched the blood of the murdered girl! It was too unbelievable that the police would not bother to do this. Apparently, they only ran a blood type. I think this makes a hole in the plot of this movie as big as the Grand Canyon. WAY too unbelievable.
Also unbelievable was that Kevin Bacon's character would not bother to find out what happened to Dave, particularly when Sean Penn, in so many words, confessed to Dave's murder. (He said, "You were too late finding the murderer.") DUH. What was that all about? Were we supposed to feel bad for Sean Penn's character because he brutally murdered the wrong person and made a mistake?
I can't call this a good movie in light of the weak plot and unbelievable character development. What a lame movie. I think critics liked it simply because it was such a sordid story, rather than looking at it critically and finding the obvious flaws.