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70An intelligently proficient movie that works more effectively as a family drama than a legal thriller.
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70Delivers the entertaining goods without fuss or frills.
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63Hackman is, as ever, a master performer, an actor at the peak of his powers. However, he can't carry the whole movie.
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60The usual John Grisham legal hokum, tranformed by director James Foley into surprisingly grim and affecting stuff.
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60Though it lacks the gloss, twists and star power of earlier Grisham movies, The Chamber does possess Gene Hackman's most cantankerous turn since the lowdown lawman he created in "Unforgiven."
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50The films portray the Klan as criminal, racist and anonymous, but those have always been its selling points; it is not portrayed as boring and stupid.
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50Hackman gives a powerful performance as the killer, and the storytelling is often gripping. But the film contains much extremely offensive language and gratuitous depictions of violence, some of it aimed at children, not needed to get the plot across.
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50The Chamber merits some respect for daring to be gloomy, for facing the capital punishment issue head-on and for the quality of Gene Hackman's performance. [11 October 1996, p.1D]
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50Mechanical and artificial, and tells you what to think.
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50The Chamber goes so far toward humanizing bigotry it ends up sentimentalizing it.
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50Even more sad is an embarrassingly shrill performance by Faye Dunaway, and an ending which insults the ability of the audience to watch a movie without having a conclusion spoon-fed to them.
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50Timing does no favors for The Chamber, the John Grisham death row drama that arrives on the heels of a better death row film (''Dead Man Walking'') and a better Grisham adaptation (''A Time to Kill''). But this film's also-ran aspects are partly offset by Gene Hackman's superlative performance.
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40No fun at all.
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An adequate, inoffensive thriller that, every so often, shows itself to be a little smarter than it needs to be… even if it isn't often enough to make this thriller anything more than average.
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40The Chamber is like a balloon that all the air has leaked out of. Maybe it wasn't magnificent before, but in its current state it is sad indeed.
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The film flails all over the place in an attempt to appear tense and authoritative--but the plot never takes hold.
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40Material so bereft of plot and insight that all it can provide is actorly turns with no cogent means for tying them together.
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25The Chamber has nowhere to go and it goes there slowly, flirting in all directions.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 1 out of 3
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Mixed: 2 out of 3
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Negative: 0 out of 3
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CapoRegime5Not as intense as the other Grisham based films. Thumbs up to Hackman, only to him.