Am I missing something?

Rating: 3/10 (20 August 2000)

This movie was one of the most terribly formulaic movies I've seen in years. It's basically Saving Private Ryan or Titanic's beginning and ending with a different plot thrown in the middle. While that's always been a typical formula, due to the abundance in recent years of similar films it's just not excusable anymore. Add to that the trademark, Hollywood cliche mix of cute, out of place humor and overly sentimental drama thrown in throughout the film and you've got one of the most overrated movies of the year. True, most of 1999's best movies (Magnolia, Cider House Rules, American Beauty, Boys Don't Cry) were also overly sentimental, but at least they had worthwhile messages. The best The Green Mile can muster is something like a trite "don't judge a book by its cover" or the even more annoying "don't be mean to convicted killers, it hurts their feelings." Don't get me wrong, it's not that I wasn't disgusted by the treatment these men received (I'm not even an advocate of capital punishment), it's just the way the film handled these situations that made me gag.
I really did want to like this film as the acting is superb and the technical elements are all in place, but the contrived plot constantly detracted from the film's overall quality. If you want to see one of 1999's truly good films, I recommend seeing one or all of the movies I mentioned above. This certainly isn't anywhere near the quality of Frank Darabont's true masterpiece, The Shawshank Redemption.