The best bad movie I've ever seen

Rating: 5/10 (4 February 2011)

Sometimes it's fun to criticize a bad movie, but not always. The Green Mile is the first bad movie it is going to physically pain me to criticize.
This is a story about the death row at a Louisiana prison in 1935. Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) is the hard yet decent man in charge of this last stop for prisoners on their way to the electric chair. Paul is good friends with his boss, Warden Hal Moores (James Cromwell), and is a good leader of his fellow guards. His three closest co-workers are the appropriately named "Brutal" Howell (David Morse, the young Dean Stanton (Barry Pepper) and the middle-aged Harry Terwilliger (Jeffrey DeMunn). These are 4 decent men trying to do an unpleasant task as well as it can be done.
The 5th guard on death row is not so decent. Percy Wetmore (Doug Hutchison) is a mean, weak and petulant young man who got his job in the prison because he's the nephew of the governor's wife. If Paul or anyone else bothers him, it would just take one call from Percy to cost them their jobs. In the Depression, that's better protection than a platoon of marines.
The other important characters in this tale are Jan Edgecomb (the gorgeous Bonnie Hunt), the kind and tender wife of Paul; the vile and deranged death row prisoner "Wild Bill" Wharton (Sam Rockwell); a meek and comical Green Mile inmate named Eduard Delacroix (Michael Jeter) and his pet mouse Mr. Jingles; the warden's fatally ill wife Melinda (Patricia Clarkson); and most of all, a gigantic black prisoner named John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan).
John Coffey was condemned to die after he was found with the raped and bloody bodies of two young girls in his arms. But when Paul and the other guards witness and experience John Coffey's magical ability to heal people from their sicknesses and their suffering, they begin to doubt that God would grant that sort of power to any murderer and to dread the day when John Coffey will have to sit in that electric chair.
I'm not going to go any further into the story of The Green Mile because, well, there's really not that much of a story. I will say the acting in this film is almost universally superb and the direction by Frank Darabont is just as excellent. This movie looks good. It sounds good. It even feels good. For all that, though, The Green Mile is NOT a good film.
Firstly, at over three hours, it's just too flippin' long. You could easily cut out at least a half hour and probably 45 minutes and lose absolutely nothing. It's never completely boring, but it's so languid and placid and every scene takes forever to get started, to get going and to get done. It's the sort of too long movie that's not tough to get through the first time you see it, but if you try and watch it again you'll wonder how you ever made it through at all.
Secondly, as I mentioned before, there's very little story in this film. There are events that happen and things the characters do, but there's no real purpose to any of it because there's no real conflict or moral in this movie. None of these characters have to grapple with any problem and change because of it. Paul Edgecomb is the same hard yet decent man at the end of the movie that he was at the beginning. John Coffey's the same. Percy's the same. "Wild Bill" is the same. These characters don't live and breathe like genuine human beings, they're just cogs in a narrative machine. They have a function to serve and that's all. Percy, in particular, couldn't have been more two-dimensional if he'd been run over by a steamroller.
Thirdly, what story there ischeats. At the start of the movie, Percy is supposed to be untouchable because of his connections. But when it's necessary for Percy to be "touchable", those connections suddenly don't matter. The audience is supposed to fall in love with Eduard Delacroix, so what he did to get on death row is never even vaguely referenced even though his guilt is never disputed. For the big sad scene where everybody is supposed to cry, one character joins in with his tears even though there wasn't a single moment in the film to explain why he should be choked up. There's an irrationally cruel ending that 100% contradicts something established earlier in the film. And there isn't a single emotional moment in the whole thing that isn't obviously and blatantly manipulative.
Fourthly, as technically good a job as writer/director Frank Darabont did, he appears totally oblivious to the sharply clashing and diametrically opposed tones in his film. He simultaneously tries to achieve a stark, Shawshank Redemption-like realism and a Disney-like family film fantasy. There's both a botched execution where someone slowly burns to death and a prison escape so silly it could have come straight out of The Apple Dumpling Gang or an episode of Three's Company. The Green Mile has R-rated language and a G-rated performing mouse.
It bothers me to point out the flaws in this film. That's because so many of the individual pieces of the movie are done so well and it's clearly made with such earnest good intentions. The Green Mile is, in many ways, the best bad movie every made. You'll probably enjoy it a great deal if you have low standards and I truly don't mean that in any condescending way. When a film has these sorts of basic problems, though, it doesn't do anyone any good to pretend they're not there.