Lack of good storyline.

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The first 117-odd minutes of this film make it seem like a masterpiece. The build-up on achieving the ultimate target is flawless. But the ending seems a bit rushed. This film and subject matter does not deserve an ending like that! All that aside, Eastwood breezes through his role and in achieving the best of directing for most of the part. All his movies have exceptional music and cinematography, and this is no less. The acting is flawless too; you love the people the movie tells you to love and you hate the people the movie tells you to hate. This is a very interesting subject matter because it deals with crime, and its intricacies, laced with a tinge of racial discrimination. How Eastwood's character derives the necessary details forms the outline to the rest of the story. I was awestruck for the first 117-odd minutes of this movie. The rest of the movie's runtime, well, not so much. But don't go by the movie's ratings. Give it a watch, just for Eastwood and Isaiah Washington. You will not like the way that the ending was dealt with; I'll give you that.

Steve Everett (Clint Eastwood) is a womanizing married recovering alcoholic. He returns to his journalist job at Oakland Tribune after rehab. A young reporter dies in an accident and he assigned her interview with death row inmate Frank Beechum (Isaiah Washington). Beechum was a troubled youth until he became born-again and married to Bonnie (LisaGay Hamilton). He's scheduled to be executed in a few hours for the murder of a pregnant store clerk but Everett starts to wonder about his guilt.There is a functional investigative crime mystery in this movie although the plot isn't very surprising. Clint Eastwood has filled it with too much uninteresting filler. Some of it is really cheesy. I think he wants Reverend Shillerman to be comic relief which really doesn't work. The most annoying is the Hollywood high speed chase to end the investigation. It's utterly ridiculous. Maybe he could call the governor or the prison or the wife. It's a bad attempt to make it artificially exciting.

There was so much laughter in the theater when I saw this movie. It was making me mad, because I had paid a fair amount to watch this thing. However, as the movie went on, I found myself having a hard time not laughing either. The script as awful. The acting was terrible. The direction, horrific. It was just a really bad movie that looked like it was made by a first time director, with a learning disability. Then there is the total lack of any realism. Growing up I was such a big fan of the actor that was Clint Eastwood. As an adult, I cannot believe how truly terrible he is as a director. And the uncomfortable romance scenes had be squirming. Hey gramps, quit being a pervert. But I digress, horrible and unrealistic movie.

Clint Eastwood has always been great at playing anti-Heroes, but this time, he went full out, playing a recovering alcoholic reporter who uses the case of a death row inmate to refurbish his career.You just don't like his character in this movie. He's a horrible husband, father and so on. He doesn't care about justice, he just cares about winning a Pulitzer. There's really nothing admirable about his character at all.Still, Clint does a good job here, and he has a great supporting cast, such as Isaiah Washington as the convict he is trying to save, or James Wood as his cynical editor. Also look for Lucy Liu as a store clerk before anyone knew who she was.I also kind of get the feeling that this role was written for a younger actor. One you could believe plausibly as the father of a six year old. The movie drags in places and is quite uncomfortable to watch in others. (Again, just about any scene with the aforementioned six year old in them.)