1/5 Leave it Dead!
  by Norb (Palos Park, IL USA)
Just a lot of bleeding heart mumbo jumbo. Robbins directed it like it was a high school play. Terrible!

4/5 fast service
  by Lauren L. Brown
I received this very quickly. However, it does seem that the soundtrack is somewhat of poor quality. It is audible and works fine enough to watch, but it did not seem to be up to par with most other DVD's. Possibly it is just that the movie is older.

3/5 2.5 stars out of 4
  by One-Line Film Reviews (Easton, MD)
The Bottom Line:

Slow and obvious, Dead Man Walking impressed a lot of critics and academy voters but I must confess to finding it rather boring; the acting is good enough (Penn more than Sarandon) but the characters don't draw much interest from the audience and the lack of conflict and tension render the film rather dull.

4/5 Sarandon--riding along into the sunset--with Sean Penn...
  by Roberto Frangie (Leon, Gto. Mexico)
It's easy to kill a monster, but it's hard to kill a human being.'

Set in St. Thomas Housing Project and Angola Prison in New Orleans, "Dead Man Walking" is the true story of Helen Prejean (Susan Sarandon), a Louisiana nun Sister who befriended Matthew Poncelet (Sean Penn), a murderer and a rapist bound for a lethal injection machine for killing a teenage couple... Sister Helen agrees to help the convict and to remain with him till the end--an act never before attempted by a woman...

At their first meeting, Poncelet swears to the nun that his accomplice was the one who shot both of the kids and pleads her help for a new trial in order to convince the pardon board hearing to spare his life...

The film challenges the audience to actually give some thought to the human consequences of the death penalty, but gives voice to angry bereaved parents whose kids were shot, stabbed, raped, and left in the woods to die alone...

As Poncelet's execution looms closer and closer, his character is seen deceptively complex, harboring doubts about the rightness of what they were doing to him... In one moment, we hear him sensitive asking for a lie detector test to let his mother know that he is innocent, in another we see him furious playing the victim, blaming the government, drugs, blacks, the kids for being there... Poncelet never understood that he has robbed the Percys and the Delacroixs so much, giving them nothing but sorrow... They are never going to see their children again, never going to hold them, to love them, to laugh with them...

In the scenes leading up to his execution, the death-row inmate drops his terrible facade and reveals his identity... Luckily both Sarandon and Penn are here exceptional--carrying out successfully an exquisite, tangible harmony of souls... When Sarandon was looking at Penn, she was projecting compassionate eyes brimming with tears... She asks him to visualize her as he dies-- ''I want the last thing you see in this world to be the face of love''--in that moment, we truly believed that she'll be the face of love for him...


4/5 Compassion and Truth Triumph
  by Bradley Headstone (New York)
This is an interesting movie that explores the concepts of capitol punishment. The movie claims to be neutral, but it does seem to be against it.

Very quickly, Sister Helen Prejean (Susan Sarandon) is visiting Sean Penn who is sentenced to die for having a part in killing 2 teenagers. Sarandon tries to be compassionate, but she realizes that Penn at the very least has issues. She is trying to get Penn to believe in Jesus (seeing that his days are numbered). Penn denies responsibility for the deaths of the teenagers, so Sarandon does everything within her power to see that he gets fair chances of appeals. Needless to say, the parents of the victims just want Penn executed. (This begins an interesting subplot that will come full circle.)

Penn may have gotten some miles in his pleas, but he makes the DUMB mistake of praising Adolf Hitler on television. Granted, innocent people have been arrested and executed, but Penn has now shown his 'issues' on television for all to see. Needless to say, Sarandon is annoyed.

Perhaps due to Penn's acting abilities, we come to care about his character despite his crimes and mental issues. We then see that his execution is inevitable, and Sarandon has to go through the difficult job of being at Penn's side to the end. The methods of execution start to look cold and calculating. And we start to wonder what gives us the right to take the life of even a criminal. We can see that Sarandon gets little help from those she should. While the Prison Chaplain coldly says: "The Old Testament says 'an eye for an eye,' Sarandon bitterly counters it: "What about the NEW Testament where Jesus says: 'A man is greater than his worst sin?'"

There is some release of tension as Penn has a moment with his family. Once he confesses his guilt, the writer does not allow our newly won sympathy for Penn to slack for a moment. It will in fact increase right up until the end. Sarandon's arguably strongest moment is when she tells Penn to just keep his eyes on her face as sentence is carried out. In a way, Penn does have a final triumphant moment when he can honestly say: "Killing is wrong, whether it's me who does it, or your government." In other words, Penn has shown his executioners as well as others that they have become what they accused him of being.

If you are for capitol punishment, you are probably not going to like this movie. But if you are against it, you probably will like it a lot despite its profound sadness.