Review of The Green Mile (1999) by Sk3Z — 30 Dec 2013

This film is Pander. Period.

Basically, it starts and ends without questioning death penalty. Death penalty is barbaric for MY culture, and the behavior of the characters never seems realistic to me. The horrible system behind death row is depicted in a mitigate, sweetened way. There's no room for compassion in death penalty as shown in the film, and this film is basically offensive solely for the way the characters are behaving.

Second: nothing is believable. Clearly is a fantasy drama, but still as the stereotyped characters (bad people are bad without a reason, they are simply mad. Good people are in fact not really good, but seam dumb and ataraxic, resulting in unlovable characters). The main character is basically a scary black giant who cries all the time. Very easy way to provoke reactions in the viewer is to show him something which he's unconsciously scared off while enforcing this unconscious fear with clever direction. Incidentally this unconscious fear is based on a black stupid strong man stereotype overlapped by the boogeyman figure. I'm a caucasian european man and I find this VERY offensive.

The whole story, in the end, is based on emotional tricks. (the *spoiler* bad death scene is traumatic and unnecessary, at least as it is shown). Giving strong emotions to people based on meaningless story or characters is a cheat.

This film is bad. I couldn't expect this since the reviews are so high. But I found this film ruffian, manipulative and ultimately ugly.