He's dreadful and it spreads through the rest of the cast like a virus. As weak as the Grover driven script is, the Grover driven performance is even worse.

The music sounds like the theme song for clowns at a carnival and it plays with full comic effect. There are many failures that contribute to 'Unspeakable' and its near total collapse. From 'The Silence of the Lambs' there comes a psychiatrist and serial killer playing an information game. From 'The Night of the Hunter' comes the tattooed knuckles of love and hate as well as an attempt at the cool charisma and menace of Robert Mitchum. I already mentioned 'The Green Mile' and that it is one of at least three superior films that 'Unspeakable' unsuccessfully compares itself to. There are clever aphorisms scattered like breadcrumbs for Hansel and Gretel but they don't lead anywhere. Finding these blurred and hidden themes though isn't worth the effort. There is an unfriendly look at religion, the nature of good and evil, the capacity for cruelty and the psychological and philosophical motivations for it. Pavan Grover wrote the screenplay and there are glimpses of good ideas. The tragedy (for the film makers - and comedy for us) is that it takes itself extremely seriously and begins to implode at every opening. If you were going for satire it might work. The problem is that the film seems to believe that if one mean guard is good, 100 mean guards will be great. In comparison, every guard in 'Unspeakable' is both sadistic and incompetent. Prisoners in 'The Green Mile' are treated compassionately and it becomes deeply effective in decrying capital punishment through the actions of a sadistically incompetent guard. Granted many movies aren't going to compare favourably to 'The Green Mile,' but in 'The Green Mile' similar themes are dealt with. In fact, it doesn't stand up well in a light breeze. The problem is that it has a lot of competition and 'Unspeakable' does not stand up very well to it.

Hampered by any number of problems, one of the worst is a ham-handed anti-capital punishment message that tries to put a human face on the issue. 'Unspeakable' is a very nearly perfect storm of bad movie-making. It actually hurts to write the following review because it pretty much admits I'm a superficial person who was suckered into watching a movie that was stashed in the box and write-up of a much more interesting looking film. In the case of 'Unspeakable' it is the exact opposite. Usually that means beautiful things may be hidden by a ugly exterior. Valuable life lesson: You can't always judge a book by its cover.

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