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In 1996, Sharon Stone put a little grit into her glamorous image by playing a suspicious, snarling death row inmate caught up in the politics of the death penalty. Director Bruce Beresford tackled a similar drama in his uncompromising
Breaker Morant, but here he's stuck with a script that favors the tepid story of her ne'er-do-well clemency lawyer (Rob Morrow), whose dormant conscience awakens as he champions her case. It's a well-meaning effort undercut by sentimentality (Beresford gives in to the impulse to find the sweet puppy dog behind Stone's feral street-mutt exterior) and the bad luck to come after the similarly themed but superior
Dead Man Walking. Give Stone credit for the passion and conviction to make you care anyway.
--Sean Axmaker
Although Bruce Beresford's capital-punishment drama, in which Sharon Stone plays a murderer awaiting execution, is bound to be compared with "Dead Man Walking," most of the optimistic moviegoers who buy tickets to this new picture probably aren't expecting docudrama realism. More likely, they're hoping for a flamboyant death-row weepie on the order of "I Want to Live!" (1958), in which Susan Hayward tottered on high heels to a date with destiny in the gas chamber at San Quentin. No one spends good money to watch Sharon Stone underact. But that's exactly what she does here, giving a quiet, unmannered performance as a remorseful killer whose case arouses the interest of a young lawyer (dull Rob Morrow) in the Governer's office. Stone's ability to suppress her natural extravagance and remain in character would be more impressive if the screenwriter, Ron Koslow, had supplied her with a character worth remaining in. This picture won't satisfy anyone: it's too hokey and melodramatic to be taken seriously, yet too restrained to rate as a camp classic. Also with Randy Quaid and Peter Gallagher. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
