So much wrong here

Rating: 2/10 (27 January 2000)

Comparisons of The Green Mile and Shawshank Redemption will be inevitable: same author, same director, similar settings. But where Shawshank was an inspiring story of one man's believable struggle to keep hope and follow his dreams, Green Mile resorts to magic and sentimentalism to make a vague, sappy point.
Believe it or not, the "point" of this overlong artificiality is, simply put, some folk good and some folk bad. It tries to be a stirring parable of accepting people for who they are, not what they're supposed to be, but several factors water it down. The most glaring flaw is that the entire story hinges on a supernatural element. How are we supposed to draw insight into our own lives from a movie that so heavily relies on fantasy?
The characters themselves are two dimensional stereotypes. You've got your good and fair cop here, your bratty and abusive cop there, both watching over a weepy gentle giant and a mischievous hell-raiser. But there's never anything revealed about these characters' pasts, nor insight into their motivations. Throw in a subservient and acquiescent wife, a put-upon yet diplomatic warden, a hard-nosed trial lawyer and a lovable, feisty trusty for nice scenery and you've got the entire scope of this film. There is very little character development, either. The only evidence we have of any characters' development is the maudlin lines they say the same way they say them throughout the entire movie.
All of these glossy, plastic elements in a film with a subject as controversial and sobering as capital punishment borders on the appalling. The film as a whole feels detached from the real world, and when the explicit violence that occurs is perpetuated upon cartoons, the film itself becomes a cartoon, too. It rings hollow.