The Life of David Gale

At the outset, this looked as if it might offer some initial entertainment but that ended very early on - following one perverse scene after another. Grotty writing combined with Alan Parker’s morose direction tried to manipulate our emotions - to prove that some people with a cause will commit almost any crime to win points their way. This certainly won’t help the anti-death penalty or Anti-Rape causes or much of any other cause - as most of the participant’s actions (on both sides) are presented as moronic, dishonest, vulgar and self-serving. This movie takes a typically ‘modern’ Hollywood approach, in all departments, and fails to connect with any real honesty or believability, instead aiming for crudeness. Performances varying from fairly good to by the numbers doesn’t help. The easily pleased will get caught up - but from the look of the box office returns, there weren’t many of those either.