The Life Of David Gale: Critic Reviews

Wherever you stand on the death penalty, there ought to be a law against a message movie this contrived.

David Gale may be the first liberal-leaning movie that could be brought up on assault charges since its director, Alan Parker, made Midnight Express.

Parker uses the same overbearing touch in David Gale that he did in Angela's Ashes and Mississippi Burning.

Deserves the chair for its brutal assault on subtlety.

After two hours of bludgeoning by Parker's moralistic mallet, even those who came in sympathetic to his views may leave with second thoughts.

A snide, juvenile, plot-twisting story about capital punishment that should provoke activists truly concerned about the death penalty to rage, and guilty-pleasure seekers to lament that the movie fails even as decent trash.

Going through the motions of a liberal-Hollywood polemic with the sweaty, mounting hysteria of a bad liar, The Life of David Gale is foremost an overheating gotcha machine.

The script constantly trips over small points.

Overwrought and over-directed, The Life of David Gale has ideas worth considering, but its largest group of advocates will be the already converted.

Low thrills and high dudgeon are a bad mix.

I am sure the filmmakers believe their film is against the death penalty. I believe it supports it and hopes to discredit the opponents of the penalty as unprincipled fraudsters.

This is a movie that rivets the attention and stirs our emotions before collapsing into wild, unconvincing melodrama.

Suspenseful but overworked death penalty thriller.

Not a great film, and it's doubtful its 'surprise' endings will surprise many people, but it manages to be both smoothly entertaining and engaging while carrying a strong point of view.

The Life of David Gale is the world's first movie with a penalty phase.

I ended up feeling sorry for Mr. Spacey, Ms. Winslet and Ms. Linney, so contrived was the foolishness in which they found themselves embroiled.

Grading on the curve, I give it high marks for trying something different, but somewhat lower ones for entertainment value.

Punches the expected buttons without being entirely convincing.

So nasty, hysterical and long-winded -- and unintentionally makes capital punishment foes look so twisted -- you wish someone had administered a lethal injection to this dreck in its planning stages.

An obvious and smug sermon on the death penalty.

One to add to the list of recent films not worthy of Spacey's talents.

The very things that give the picture its entertainment value -- the suspenseful contrivances of the story -- are precisely what undermine its ostensible message.

Does Kevin Spacey have a weird secret? Um, yeah, as always. But this death-penalty fable is so overwrought, no one will care.

It would take an intellect far superior to mine to explain the rationale -- or, for that matter, the release -- of David Gale.