Part thriller and part anti-death penalty message movie (with the emphasis on "mess"), director Sir Alan Parker's (Angela's Ashes) latest bit of hack work suggests he's spending too much time dealing with bureaucracy as head of the UK's Film Council and too little time thinking about how a movie works. He may be the only director out there with the ability to make every member of his talented leading cast-Kevin Spacey, Kate Winslet and Laura Linney-look like bad actors.

When we first encounter Spacey's Dr. David Gale, formerly a professor of philosophy at a Texas university and the activist face of the anti-death penalty "Deathwatch" movement, he is four days away from being executed for the murder of fellow activist Constance Hallaway (Linney). Having protested his innocence from the beginning, he has decided to give an exclusive interview to Winslet's investigative reporter Bitsey Bloom (yes, I'm serious) to tell his side of the story. Cue the flashbacks.

Gale, a big drinker, is shown falling from grace with his university after a student with whom he has had sex accuses him of rape. From there it's all down hill, as he loses his faculty position, his wife leaves him and his cherished work with "Deathwatch" is taken from him. Meanwhile, his activist friend Constance serves as his only source of guidance. As the details of his life are told to her, Bitsey becomes more and more convinced of his innocence. She sets out to prove it, as the clock ticks.

While Bitsey and co-worker Zack (Gabriel Mann) start unearthing details of Gale's life, we are informed that Bitsey acts like "Mike Wallace with PMS" and admonished to "never eat in a place where the menus have pictures of the food" (the dialogue just zings, doesn't it?). We are also treated to some of the grossest "Bye, y'all" caricatures of Texans to grace the screen in a long time. Winslet's American accent goes in and out of focus, Linney looks out of place, and Spacey slouches, wheedles and whines his way through his performance. By the time Constance and David are talking about "mending bridges" (one mends FENCES, for chrissake), you can be forgiven for wishing Gale's execution had taken place a few days earlier. And to add insult to injury, the much-ballyhooed surprise ending is obvious from the halfway point of the film.

As almost everybody who reads a newspaper or watches the news knows by now, Texas is the state quickest on the draw with the lethal hypodermic, having executed hundreds of death-row inmates in recent years. It is not a bad thing to want to make that state's abhorrent legal policies the subject of a film, but it IS a bad thing to use those policies to hang a pedestrian race-against-the-clock genre thriller upon, and then cut the film together with the subtlety of a bricklayer. As I'm sure dozens of others have pointed out, Dead Man Walking is a much more serious treatment of the issues involved. Better yet, read Scott Turow's New Yorker piece on the death sentence and the state of Illinois, and give The Life of David Gale a wide birth.