Unbelievably Hypocritical

Rating: 3/10 (28 January 2000)

Despite all its best attempts to seduce with heart-tugging moral lessons and drawn-out Oscar moments, I couldn't help but feel relieved when I admitted to myself that I hated this movie. I actually arrived a few minutes late to the screening and (thank God) missed the "Saving Private Ryan" style old-person-seeking-forgiveness bookend, yet I immediately knew exactly what was coming for the entire rest of the movie.
(CAUTION: SPOILER) You couldn't watch the demonstration of the execution, with its excruciating emphasis on the wet sponge, to know that bad, bad Percy was going to dry-fry some poor sucker. And everyone knew the lovely dying belle would be healed in a touching climax. But beyond the utterly simplistic characters, the by-numbers plot line, and the butt-numbing slowness, there was also a self-serving hypocrisy I found absolutely offensive. Given that one of the main characters is a huge black man on death row wrongfully convicted of a crime he didn't commit, we are naievely supposed to assume that this is a sensitive, anti-racist film. Yet how challenging would it have been to make that (single) black character more intelligent than even Mr. Jingles the Circus Mouse? And the final "I ain't never seen a picture show" scene is unforgivably masturbatory. Given the history of this writer-director team in "The Shawshank Redemption," which managed to skillfully engineer a happy ending and admirable morals without turning into pulp, this film was a major disappointment.