Ending is terrible (and so is the movie) (spoilers)

Rating: 6/10 (27 August 2004)

The whole scene where Jimmy's wife is telling him it's all okay and even encouraging him really seems over the top and unexpected since she had virtually no role in the movie up until then. Maybe if they'd foreshadowed it a little. Overall, the movie ends up feeling like a pointless exercise, the theme of "sins washed away in the river" is kind of inane, and someone PLEASE tell me what in the world we were supposed to make of Sean (Kevin Bacon)'s wife calling him all the time? And why would he let Jimmy go and not arrest him? Because all those years ago they didn't stop Dave from getting in the car? Is he not a good cop? Is his partner not ever going to find out? And the idea that the mute and his friend did this- if they were going to murder Brendan's girlfriend to keep Brendan home, why not just shoot her? Why beat her? The whole beating thing only makes sense as a ploy to make the audience think it was Dave. A bumbling plot, but good acting. The acting sold the crummy script. Probably the script sucked but no one had the "juice" to tell Clint Eastwood, Sean Penn, and Tim Robbins that the plot had holes almost as big as the holes in the the claims in Fahrenheit 911 (oops, my politix are coming through).