Newsnight Review discussed Kevin Spacey in Alan Parker's The Life of David Gale.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

MARK LAWSON:
Paul Morley, he is trying to do at least two things here - a kind of thriller and a moral debate film. Does he succeed?

PAUL MORLEY:
He fails in both, to such an extent that I am going to announce it's the worst film ever made. It annoys me so much. It makes me realise how I only like Kevin Spacey in a film where he limps. It's a bit like the Julie Roberts melodrama - it's like that all the way through. Parker used appalling cliches. A train stops a car achieving its target, for example. When Kate Winslet, who I believe is Madonna - she looks so much like her - when she's going to possibly save Spacey's life. What lets her down is her car overheating. Parker flags that at the beginning of the movie. It doesn't seem to be a movie against the death penalty, but a big, grand warning never to hire an American rental car. Alan Parker is an absolute hero for going out and promoting this with a straight face.

LAWSON:
Jeanette Winterson, he is trying to do something difficult here, possibly brave some would say. He is supposedly making a film about the death penalty. Three- quarters of Americans supposedly believe in it.

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
Half the Americans believe in the devil as well, so it's pretty nerve-wracking. It's leaden. It feels more like a documentary than a fast-moving thriller. I have a big problem, which is that there are four girls and four boys in this. The boys are all heroes. The unconscious message about women is very disturbing, whereas the men came off extremely well.

EKOW ESHUN:
It's a cynical film. It purports to be about the death penalty, against the death penalty. But when you think of good movies about it, something like Dead Man Walking, that's made with conviction. All the things you are talking about here are put in as commercial gestures. There is a tension here. An attempt to create a message movie, and also to create a commercial thriller. The tension is entirely unresolved, because all of it, as the film progresses, is more and more like a thriller. It abandoned the high ground and morality fairly fast and turns into a conventional, generic, quite cynical, ugly film. I found that depressing.

MORLEY:
A hangover from when George Clooney was involved in it and they were tailoring it for that. It was wonderful when Spacey was menacing in small parts, but he is now almost making a dramatic equivalent of Robin Williams in his choices.

WINTERSON:
It fishes down the middle between what it wants to say and how it achieves it, and the two sides don't synthesise at all.

LAWSON:
Some people said it's a film against the death penalty. Without giving away the ending, it's so preposterous that I suppose someone like George Bush would say, "If someone did something like that, it proves the system is wrong," but they would never do that.

MORLEY:
This is what makes me so angry. It's so badly cocked up, you are left livid, it fails on every level. As an entertainment, on all levels.

ESHUN:
It uses the death penalty for commercial ends. Ultimately, it's about entertainment, not really about a message. It doesn't have anything to say.