GEORGE W Bush has other fish to fry right now. Back in the erstwhile governor's beloved Texas, however, his former state is still top of the execution charts, and the campaign to end capital punishment goes on.

British director Alan Parker previously tackled a thorny, divisive American issue - racism - in Mississippi Burning in 1988 and now he stirs up another hornet's nest with more of his moralising self assurance.

His polemical movie, with a literate script by Charles Randolph, is a call for the abolition of the death penalty wrapped inside a thriller that overheats at the crucial moment, much like reporter Bitsey Bloom's motor.

The life of David Gale has about run its disgraced course. Gale (Kevin Spacey), a philosophy professor and crusader against the death sentence, is on Death Row for the rape and suffocating murder of his co-activist Constance (Laura Linney).

Death by lethal injection is but four days away when Gale agrees to a series of interviews - one per day - with hotshot investigative hack Bitsey (Kate Winslet, with a silly character name for a sillier performance).

Taking Bitsey back to the start in flashback, in circuitous fashion, he reveals a drink problem, broken marriage and bathroom dalliance with a student (Rhona Mitra) that led to an earlier rape charge.

Along the way, a videotape comes into Winslet's possession that reveals how Constance died. Piece by piece, Bitsey must fill in the blanks: is Gale the victim of a smear campaign by the fearful pro-death penalty lobby or does he have a track record for trouble with women? Or has he an agenda of his own?

There is none of the chemistry of Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins in Silence Of The Lambs. Winslet tries too hard to be American, while Spacey's incarcerated Gale is no longer a Gale-force figure but benign, resigned.

Spacey's best work is in Gale's raging university days, while the overwrought Winslet is put in the shade by Linney's composed turn as the self-sacrificing Constance.

The race-against-time finale, demanded by the conventions of a Hollywood thriller, leaves the moral ambiguities of Parker's film struggling for air.

The sight of Winslet struggling to run in jeans really should not be the final memory, but it is, making for an unintentional metaphor for Parker's cumbersome political message.

Updated: 09:27 Friday, March 14, 2003