The Green Mile Filmed in 1999 - Movie Review Example

I prefer watching movies in the dark to get a proper cinematic experience, so I decided to order a pizza and started watching it at night. I watched it from the beginning again so its’ plot and my reflections on it were fresh in my mind. My mom also watched it with me because she heard it got good reviews, but she’d never seen it before.
The majority of Green Mile is set in a Death Row prison ward in 1930s America. It stars Tom Hanks as guard supervisor Paul Edgecombe, who meets new inmate John Coffey, played by Michael Clarke Duncan. Coffey is portrayed as a ‘slow-witted gentle giant’ who, whose even afraid of the dark, is convicted of raping and brutally killing two young girls. He also appears to have miraculous healing powers, which ultimately heal Warden Moore’s terminally ill wife.

The film ends with John Coffey’s execution in the electric chair, but not before he realizes the true killer of the two young girls, a new inmate called William ‘Wild Bill’ Wharton. Coffey offers to share this information with Edgecombe through his visionary powers. Edgecombe is then torn between letting John ‘walk out’, or being executed. However, John tells him that he is ready to die as there is too much pain in the world.

I thought The Green Mile was a very powerful film and piece of acting from start to finish. Almost every scene had me gripped and fixated. I especially liked Tom Hanks’s character, and I viewed him as a fair and moral prison guard. For example, he made it clear to Percy (an irritating prison guard) that the prisoners on death row had enough torment to deal with without the guards exacerbating the situation.

All the other prison guards (excluding Percy) came across as likable, and treated the prisoners as ‘human beings’. However, this made me feel a bit uncomfortable because I had it worked out in my head that the prisoners were on Death Row for a reason, and what they did to be there must have been pretty brutal. This made me question whether I’d be so tolerant if I worked as a prison guard on Death Row. I liked Michael Clarke Duncan’s portrayal of John Coffey. I was touched by John’s situation and I felt stressed and anxious for him the whole way through the movie. I even wanted to help him escape and prove his innocence to the world. Read More