Frank Darabont's second Stephen King prison film. A death-row drama about miracles and electricity.
Louisiana, 1935. Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) supervises Death Row at Cold Mountain Penitentiary — the cell block whose linoleum runs green up to the electric chair. A new prisoner arrives: John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan), a giant of a man convicted of murdering two young girls. He is gentle, terrified of the dark, and slowly reveals an ability to heal.
The film unfolds at the pace of memory — it's narrated decades later by an elderly Paul — and asks the question that Stephen King's serialised novel kept circling: what is a man supposed to do when the law requires him to execute a miracle?
Darabont made The Shawshank Redemption in 1994; The Green Mile in 1999. Both are King adaptations set inside prison walls. Both treat the institution as a slow-time chamber where moral questions can be played out in silence and ritual. Shawshank is the tighter, more controlled film. The Green Mile is longer, more meandering, and more openly sentimental — and that softness is also where its power sits.
The film runs three hours and ten minutes. It uses the length. Conversations breathe. Routines repeat. The execution scenes are slow and unflinching. The film is not in a hurry to make its argument, and the argument lands harder for the patience.
The role required an actor who could be physically intimidating — Duncan was 6'5" — and also play a child's emotional register without it reading as caricature. Duncan, in his first major role, holds both. His scene in the electric chair, asking Paul not to put the hood over his face because he's afraid of the dark, is one of the most devastating in 1990s American cinema.
The performance earned Duncan an Oscar nomination. He had been a bodyguard for Will Smith and Martin Lawrence before being cast; he died in 2012 at 54.
Critics on release noted, and have noted ever since, that the film deploys a trope identified by Spike Lee in 2001: the 'magical Negro' — a Black character whose narrative purpose is to spiritually awaken or rescue a white protagonist, often dying in the process. John Coffey fits the template almost diagrammatically. The film is sincere in its sentiment but works inside a framework it never interrogates.
That doesn't disqualify it. It does mean that watching it twenty-five years later involves holding two things at once: the genuine emotional craft of the storytelling, and the awareness of whose story is centred and whose isn't.