This film tackles several highly charged themes at once (death penalty, racism, dysfunctional families, suicide), and inevitably stumbles in doing so. Dramatically it is seriously unbalanced by the accumulation of violent deaths and high drama in the gripping first half, offset by the highly undramatic and very intimate focus on the budding Berry-Thornton relationship in the second. Both parts are separated by a needlessly protracted and gratuitously explicit sex scene which I found rather tasteless and quite annoying. Halle Berry's performance is powerful, Thornton's less so; the one character that I felt truly involved with was Sonny, played impressively by Heath Ledger, but he vanishes from the scene after half an hour or so.
The final scene is so cliché that I couldn't believe my eyes - all of a sudden we're in Disneyland. In all, a film that is interesting for its prison scenes, but doesn't quite know where to go from there; apparently sincere in its intentions, the story just tapers off. Towards the end, my mind wandered.
The final scene is so cliché that I couldn't believe my eyes - all of a sudden we're in Disneyland. In all, a film that is interesting for its prison scenes, but doesn't quite know where to go from there; apparently sincere in its intentions, the story just tapers off. Towards the end, my mind wandered.