YMMV / The Life of David Gale

• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: Withholding vital evidence results in wrongful convictions.
• Anvilicious: The movie spares no effort in trying to proclaim the unfairness and inhumanity of the death penalty. Most viewers come away thinking that they may have had a point, but their presentation of the point undermined their own arguments.
• Broken Aesop: The film is very clearly against the death penalty and tries to show that an innocent person can get executed. The problem is that rather than showing someone who's a victim of circumstances or a frame-up, which would perfectly demonstrate its point, it shows the victim trying to "prove" that innocent people can get executed by framing himself for a crime he didn't commit, in the hopes that he will be exonerated and the death penalty will be abolished after he's wrongly executed. Interestingly, the film does seem to be at least somewhat aware of how clueless this looks; the whole plot comes about partly because the governor in the film made a statement that he would call a moratorium on further capital punishment if anyone were ever wrongfully executed, but once this actually does happen, he refuses to do so because the state can't be held accountable for someone abusing the system to deliberately kill themselves.
• Critical Dissonance: The film was brutalized by critics and has a 19% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Moviegoers however enjoyed it, as it has an 81% audience score on RT, as well as a 7.6/10 on IMDb.
• Don't Shoot the Message: Regarded as one of the most egregious examples of this trope in the history of film. The message that the death penalty is wrong isn't necessarily a bad one, but the execution is botched by David Gale and his co-conspirators blatantly cheating the system to "prove" that an innocent person could be executed.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Kevin Spacey portrays a man who is publicly disgraced and fired from his job as a college professor after a False Rape Accusation. He is later arrested and put on death row for allegedly raping and murdering a female friend who turns out to have orchestrated the entire thing with him as an anti-death penalty statement. After Spacey's own sexual misconduct scandals came to light, the film (which featured an extremely Anvilicious political message as is) is even more uncomfortable to watch.
• Strawman Has a Point: The governor of Texas is supposed to be seen by the audience as a hypocrite for not following through with his promise of calling a moratorium of capital punishment if evidence ever came to life of an innocent man being executed. But his point that the state cannot be held accountable for someone intentionally abusing the system because they had an axe to grind is really hard to argue against.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Roger Ebert noted in his review of the film that the movie's central characters go so ridiculously far to show that their position is right that you can't help but be disgusted with them.
  Ebert: I am sure the filmmakers believe their film is against the death penalty. I believe it supports it and hopes to discredit the opponents of the penalty as unprincipled fraudsters.

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