The Life of David Gale.

Vietnam Investment Review, August, 2003

RATING ** Directed by Alan Parker Starring Kevin Spacey, Kate Winslet, Laura Linney

ENGLISH by birth but American by cultural inclination, Alan Parker is a filmmaker of bludgeoning unsubtlety. His Midnight Express wa;; sickeningly manipulative--not to say grotesquely racist--and in Mississippi Burning he somehow managed to make the FBI the heroes of the campaign for black civil rights.

His first film since Angela's Ashes is a doubtless well-intentioned tract against capital punishment, but it's wrapped up in a mystery thriller so contrived and morally bankrupt that it ends up insulting its audience.

Spacey plays the title character, a philosophy professor with a drinking problem who, when we first meet him, is on Death Row, three days away from...