Dead man talking

The Life of David Gale opens with a car overheating and jetting a cloud of steam. Out jumps a young woman who hits the ground running as if her life depends on it. You don't need to have seen many films about the death penalty to guess what's up. It is not her life that counts, but that of a guy awaiting execution within the hour.

The scene says much about Alan Parker's new film, none of it to its advantage. Like the car, it's a rental model that's been used and misused over and over again by dozens of other hands. Its dramatic engine overheats dangerously easily, and its mileage adds up to little more than a cloud of liberal vapours emitted by a director with angermanagement problems.

Its most devious feature is the way it wraps a shamelessly unconvincing story inside one of those surprise-ending plots that film critics reveal under pain of their own death penalty. Thus the full convoluted nonsense underpinning its abolitionist argument can only be experienced by those unfortunate enough to sit through it.

A former philosophy professor, Charles Randolph, scripted it - his first effort. Since the central character is a philosophy professor, David Gale (Kevin Spacey), first seen lecturing on Jacques Lacan's theory of fantasy at the University of Texas, it is likely one of those "what if " fantasies of Randolph's own brain.

What if the leading anti-death penalty crusader in a state that has executed more of death row's lengthy boarders than any other in the US finished up on death row charged with the rape and murder of a campus colleague?

Gale has spent six years on the row, awaiting a lethal injection. In his last four days, he sells his life story to an ace investigative reporter, Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet), for her magazine's half-million dollars. As he talks, flashbacks show us how he got there.

Gale's a prof with a collapsing marriage, a drink problem and a habit of trading dirty limericks at student-faculty dos. It's the sort of morally flabby, flippantly jokey, mentally arrogant, articulately sophisticated role that suits a character-actor like Spacey, but we've seen it played once too often.

The creepy double-dealing he practises on Bitsey from behind bars on death row recalls his unreliable narrator in The Usual Suspects. His cynicism recalls his rancid American Beauty performance. This time, though, he doesn't just fantasise an affair with his teenage daughter's best friend. Gale goes the whole way and has anal sex with a vixenish student (Rhona Mitra) who lures him on in order to degrade his tutorial authority and assert her own gender ascendancy.

She cries rape, then withdraws the charge and lets him swing in the wind until he's sacked. Parker shoots the scene of violation much as Michael Winner might once have done, with a voyeuristic lubricity. It's a bad error of judgment. It makes one forfeit all respect for Gale's moral worth, whatever political agenda he's pushing. It taints this sleazy academic's claim to inhabit a higher moral plane than the capital punishment crowd.

In any case, the film does his fellow abolitionists no favours. They're depicted as a rabid bunch of hysterical dissidents who'd go to any lengths to rig their case. The remainder of the film shows the lengths they go to - or, rather, the lengths that Gale goes to.

After his fall from grace, he takes to the sidewalks, ranting drunkenly about Socrates trying to escape the death penalty for corrupting Greek youth by suggesting that his judges simply fine him. It is welcome to find hubris and other philosophical maladies in a film designed for the mainstream proles, but it's rather more information than we need.

For sympathy, Gale turns to Constance Harraway (Laura Linney), his campus friend and fellow campaigner. But she's dying of leukaemia. Miserabilism seems to attract Alan Parker: remember how it came by the ton load in Angela's Ashes?

Suddenly, Gale is arrested. Constance has been murdered, by someone who handcuffedher, forced her to swallow the key, then asphyxiated her in a plastic bag. Gale's semen is in her body. Is he guilty, or is someone framing him? A mysterious video of the dreadful scene turns up in Winslet's motel room, and is played, in whole or part, several queasy times until the unedited version finally shows what really happened.

As an anti-death penalty polemic, Parker's own film is as dubious a fabrication as the video. The degree of planning and timing, never mind luck, required to ensure that Bitsey can finally mount a robust attack on capital punishment scarcely bears an instant's inspection. The scheme is so fictionally outlandish it discredits the film's pro-life political bias. All one is left with is a race-against-time mystery, more and more far-fetched and improbable as the journalist unravels the jaw-dropping truth and tries to rush the evidence to the jail on time.