I’m not sure if the director and writer of “The Life of David Gale” set out to make a safe movie dealing with the death penalty. This movie seemed to be a sophisticated take on capital punishment, but it’s actually the same thriller Hollywood pumps out every year with a “whodunit” story plot and twist at the end.

With such a controversial issue, you would think that some debate would sprout after seeing the film, but that isn’t the case here.

From the get-go, you can see that the director and the screenwriter think they are on to something big in how they exaggerate the most minimal aspects of their story into something more than they should.

Kevin Spacey plays the title character, accused of murder and is shown four days before his execution. Gale grants Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet), a reporter for a magazine called news (really), an interview so that she may prove his innocence.

Told in a series of flashbacks, Gale relates how he was a charismatic, hard-drinking philosophy professor at the University of Austin in Texas whose career was derailed when he had an affair with an ex-student who would do anything for a good grade, and then accuses him of rape. We also learn that he was one of the leaders of the outspoken death penalty group DeathWatch, and so was Constance (Laura Linney), a leukemia-stricken friend, who he is now accused of raping and suffocating with a plastic bag.

Bloom (Kate Winslet) and her sidekick intern try desperately to prove his innocence when they receive a tape of the murder, which they try to retrace.

The bad editing of the flashbacks made it feel like you were watching a serial killer movie with flashing words like “murder,” “guilt” and “pain” on the screen.

The film’s plot is so thin, anyone could tell you what was going to happen at any given moment. I don’t want to give away the ending, but it seems ludicrous that any person would go to such length to prove a point.

Given its Oscar-caliber cast, I had high hopes of “Gale.” Spacey, one the best actors in film today, tries to make something of his conflicted character. But when you realize what he really is up to, it seems ridiculous that his character would be believable. Winslet’s character is also reduced to nothing, even after all the crying and the “oh why, oh why” speech.

To the film’s credit, it does have a compelling and timely argument that shows that an unacknowledged number of death-row inmates are innocent. But this particular scenario of injustice does little to prove a point. Whether you are for or against the death penalty, there should be a better movie with a message that is this fixed.

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