Certainly not a cheerful movie or the best of Grisham adaptations, The Chamber still has some merits. Chris O'Donnell looks a lot like Matt Damon (who ended up stealing his thunder) and plays Adam Hall, the lawyer grandson of Cayhall, a racist, convicted murder, waiting for his execution in a Mississippi jail. Hackman plays Sam Cayhall, gran-dad in death row with not a soft bone in his old body - or has he?Hackman's interpretation is amazingly good. His Cayhall is an ignorant brute who lost his youth and family to the demented ideas of the KKK and now feels betrayed by his ancient friends, but still reluctant to let go of his foolish beliefs. Cayhall is truly a tragic figure, an ignorant man, manipulated for purposes he was too stupid to understand and sacrificed by more powerful players. One cannot avoid feeling repelled, yet sorry for him.Dunaway is Lee, Cayhal's alcoholic daughter and - obviously - Adam's aunt. The main problem is that Dunaway was too old for the part. She does a decent job and has a heartbreaking goodbye scene with Hackman - really well acted and not fake or manipulative. However, she is only 11 years younger than Hackman and she was not believable as his daughter. I guess somebody like Patricia Clarkson or Susan Sarandon would have been a better choice.Anyway, for once I think that the 6 in IMDb is a fair vote. The story is too depressing, O'Donnell does not carry enough weight for such a difficult part, Dunaway was too old and the script is very uninspired. To be seen mainly for Hackman's amazing interpretation.

Mostly a bore, it is a challenge to make Racism, the KKK, the Death Penalty, and the whole separatist Culture of the fight for Civil Rights South era seem uninteresting. This all plays like surface stuff and nothing really rings true. The lack of depth about any of the above subjects is this Movie's downfall. All of it is glossed over so unconvincingly that it a sight to behold. All of the Characters, except maybe Gene Hackman's internal combustion, are uninteresting and shallow.There is NO Courtroom Drama, very little insight into the workings or deviance of the Klan and the whole argument driving the Story is that the Death Penalty should not be instituted because this Good Ole' Boy is a product of his environment is woefully undeveloped and a desperate measure at best.Nothing here is intriguing, or the slightest bit engaging, and considering the subject matter, a total waste of time. Nothing is gained, learned, or even moderately explored in this Film and it is an unredeemable misfire, that aside from the horribly diluted Script, is doomed from the outset with the total miscasting of Chris O'Donnell.

Schock-free, little suspense and a absolutely horrible performance by Faye Dunaway. This is what this movie has going for it.A grandson fights for his racist grandfather's life. This could have been interesting but we get little to no insight about the back story which led to the event. I will reveal that it has something to do with a murder and the grandfather about to get the gas chamber. I don't think it will spoil anyones enjoyment of the film or vice versa.The problem is that Gene Hackman as the grandfather is such a underwritten character and he is not portrayed enough as the monster he is supposed to be. Yes, he is a white supremacist and his own family resented him for it, but he comes off much too sympathetic as the plot goes along. He yells and resists at first, he mocks his liberal grandson and that's about it.Chris O'Donnell as the grandson doesn't really register either. We know his motivation but we don't really feel his pain of learning where he comes from. Again, the script is severely underwritten on his part.Then the worst of all. The daughter, played by Faye Dunaway. There is a scene at the end between Hackman and Dunaway that is so false, so unintentionally hilarious that I almost shut the film off.The ending is sad but it doesn't have enough emotional power either. Because Hackman has neither been portrayed as a total monster, nor has he been portrayed as monster with a heart, we could care less if he lives or dies.

If the title, "The Chamber", is meant to be a pun, it's a pretty good one. There's the judge's "chamber" where decisions are made, and, at the other end, the gas "chamber" where those plans are executed along with the inmate to whom those judgments were passed down.In some ways, the title is the niftiest part of the movie. For John Gresham, whose intentions are always benign, it's a pretty weak story. (It shouldn't be, with William Goldman doing the adaptation.) It's Gresham's most pedantic. Condemned are both racist violence and the death penalty, the former more so than the latter.That's the bothersome part of the plot. Okay, Gene Hackman does his best with the role of the lifetime KKK bomber who takes the rap for the real killer of the two Jewish children. But he's miscast. Hackman is not an unreflective, defiant, redneck racist and murderer. JAMES WOODS is that character. Hackman is absolutely first-rate (without being a bravura actor) when he gets the right role, whether it's villainous or heroic, but he's never been good with accents and, man, does this role call for one.At that, he gives the strongest performance in the film, with support from a couple of seasoned players like Harve Presnell. Gresham's relatively innocent young idealist, Chris O'Donnell, does not convince. He looks the part alright but his voice and gestures suggest a weakness that the character shouldn't have. And he's the main man. Some of the supporting players, like Bo Jackson as Sergeant Packer, can't seem to act at all.The climax involves one of those detailed execution scenes I've come to loathe. I don't understand why they're there. In a short cinematic exercise in the early 1940s, Orson Welles used the first-person camera to guide the viewer into a gas chamber. Then, in the mid-50s, there was a detailed execution of Susan Hayward in "I Want to Live." Then there was a hiatus for another twenty years or so before these tasteless scenes came back with a vengeance. Here we get to see Gene Hackman gassed to death, the foamy spittle dripping from his mouth as he expires. But what does this tell us? That execution is horrifying and painful? What else is new? So what do these scenes tell us that we don't already know? I understand some TV channels are negotiating with Texas to film executions for broadcast. (How long before the opportunity to pull the switch is auctioned on eBay?) What kind of audience do the writers and directors think they're addressing? The musical score is by Carter Burwell and it's fairly conventional, full of deep and ominous chords. He's a talented composer who has done quirkier work in better films like "Fargo" and "The Spanish Prisoner." Judging from the movies that are based on his novels, John Gresham is in the not-uncommon position of being at odds with the values of the society he grew up in. A lot of other marginalized writers have also been prompted to explain the sins of their culture's past to the rest of us, beginning maybe with Nathaniel Hawthorne and running through the Southern giants of American literature and playwriting -- Tennessee Williams, Faulkner, and the rest. Gresham fits the mold and his work is interesting, but this is a failed effort. The legal aspects are confusing, the characters a bit muddled, and the story itself either too simple or too complex, depending on how you look at it.