a terrible would-be successor to "The Shawshank Redemption"

Rating: 1/10 (6 March 2000)

I really wanted to like this film, I really tried to. But in the end I heavily regretted having seen it and personally I think of "The Green Mile" as the first appalling film of this year. This saddens me the more as the director of that film is Frank Darabont who brought us the wonderful "Shawshank Redemption". The parallels to his debut from 1994 are obvious: a prison story full of optimism(a friendship between the two main protagonists (one black, one white)) written by the same author (King) and again overlength (this time you've even got a running time of 3 hours+).I would argue that already the story itself is problematic in its conception: the characterisation is implausible. The prisoners (with the exception of one) are all portrayed as good natured men who obviously could do no harm to other people. It makes the fact that they've been sentenced to death for heinous crimes the more unlikely. For a grim and dark place like a prison the green mile is a unusual harmonistic place.This depiction of a prison and the characters is not just naive and almost laughable, it also reminded me of how more realistic and appropriate in such terms "Shawshank Redemption" was. People could say that the film generally is not very realistic since John Coffey has supernatural powers but I honestly think that capital punishment is a too serious subject to treat it as an element of a fairy tale. Moreover the film never questions the death penalty, the message rather seems to be that death row is a necessity. Again I was reminded of an another film, Tim Robbins' "Dead Man Walking", arguably one of the best and most important american films of the last decade(if you want to see an appropriate and artistic convincing account of the death row, then you're in for a treat).There's basically nothing to say against an optimistic approach when you're talking about such a sad, disturbing and important issue, but what made me really upset about "The Green Mile" is the unbearable extent of sentimentality and naivety in the film. Sure, "Shawshank Redemption" was emotional, too; but there it felt right, there Darabont managed to find the right tone - here it is just pure kitsch. When Coffey says towards the end something along the lines that people shouldn't treat each other badly and that he wants a peaceful world, I almost started to giggle. Moreover the contrast between the harmonistic, light- hearted scenes with the mouse and the execution scenes doesn't work at all, it destroys the film. Moreover these three scenes (particularly Percys revenge on Delacroix) are not just
disgusting(and believe me, I can really bear a lot),they perfectly fit into this unpleasant mixture of feel good- mentality and pathos. There were good performances in the film (Doug Hutchinson, the "Polaroid Man" from Chris Carters "Millennium", Michael Duncan Clarke, who made the best out of his cliche role), but in the end I didn't care about the one or two good things I could say about this film. And Tom Hanks? Well, Hanks should really try something new-he's played the clean, good-natured guy so often, that it starts to get on my nerves and not just on mine.I just can't put into words, how much better, how superior "Shawshank" was than "The Green Mile". The difference is not just striking, it really hurts. When I was watching "The Green Mile" I heard people in the audience crying - I was tempted too, but not because I was moved, no, in my case it would have been out of sheer disgust. What a missed opportunity...