The Life of David Gale (original) (raw)

This movie is quite a box of tricks, and director Alan Parker has turned the handle at the side and cranked out two hours' worth of flashy, meretricious and deeply silly nonsense. Ostensibly a thriller about capital punishment, it's almost incandescent with self-importance.

Kevin Spacey raises that supercilious eyebrow of his as David Gale, an anti-death-penalty campaigner. Due to a hogwhimpering irony of fate, he finds himself on Death Row in Texas, for the rape and murder of his fellow activist Constance Harraway (Laura Linney). But in the final days before the medicide needle goes in, he summons fearless and beautiful investigative reporter Elizabeth "Bitsey" Bloom (Kate Winslet) to give her a sensational interview from behind bars, around which his story is structured in flashbacks that withhold from us vital bits of information in order to facilitate the final, sclerotic twist - a twist which is simultaneously telegraphed and undermined by the plot's outrageous, lumbering inanities.

Fan though I am of his great performances of yore, Spacey's perpetual air of sardonic superiority is now getting very grating. Winslet, another formidable performer unhappily adrift here, is supposed to have done jail time herself for protecting her sources on a story her magazine has unblushingly headlined Kiddie Porn. I can only say that if "Bitsey" has been in prison, I'm a member of the Sadler's Wells ballet. There's a student-level debate about the death penalty, and the movie is coloured by an unpleasant voyeurism as we get stuck into a video showing the victim stark naked. Parker's technical bravura can't conceal how shallow and flatulent this film is.