A good movie

What happened to Alan Parker? Apparently, the guy has retired and this was the last movie he made. Personally, I always had a weak spot for his work and I was really eager to check this final directing effort. There was also a pretty terrific cast (Kate Winslet, Kevin Spacey, Laura Linney) and the subject was quite spellbinding. Indeed, the whole thing is basically a really far-fetched sensationalist political thriller (for example, Roger Ebert really hated this flick and gave it a zero star which was really exaggerated in my opinion) but I thought it developed some interesting ideas, even if the way those ideas were displayed was pretty awkward. The point is that it is a movie which tries to give some food-for-thought about the subject but it does it by using the preposterous techniques used in your average thriller. Therefore, at the end, you have some massive twists which were, as usual, supposedly spectacular but, when you think about it for a few minutes, were rather unbelievable. Still, somehow, a far-fetched thriller dealing with the death penalty was actually somehow more compelling than a far-fetched thriller dealing with a serial killer. To conclude, even though the whole thing was deeply flawed, I actually liked the damned thing and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you are interested by the subject.

7/10