When I watched The Green Mile over 2 decades ago, I was fascinated by the story. However, this genre of movies, i.e. fantasy mixed with drama, cannot excite me anymore. These days, I prefer either thoroughly fantasy or purely drama-driven movies. I guess the director, Frank Darabont, was trying to make a duplicate of his former masterpiece, Shawshank Redemption, with pretty similar plot in the same setting, i.e. prison, and the same writer, Stephen King.
Although the characters, even the villains, were playing their parts extraordinarily, The Green Mile failed to impress me sufficiently. This is mostly because of the story, which is too staged. Every character is like a piece of the puzzle perfectly fitting in to the adjacent one. This is not something you expect to see in real life. The end part of the movie was the worst when the protagonist acted by Tom Hanks and even the little mouse are sentenced to immortality as a punishment. What was the mouse’s fault? To me, the film was too long (over 3 hours) and rather boring, and I had to fast-forward many scenes.
I could also find a contradiction in the plot where Paul explained to the old lady by the end of the film that he had been cursed to immortality for doing nothing wrong. Join Coffey himself had no complaint about his conviction and was pleased to depart this world. My logic tells me that John could never curse Paul, let alone the little mouse simply by holding Paul’s hands or the entire mouse for a moment.