In the title I write that the story is ludicrous. below I'll elaborate and tell you why it, in my humble opinion, ruins this movie.<br /><br />Gere and Danes are doing their jobs, and while it's not their best work, it's quite OK. The rest of the cast, though, is doing a really poor job. Mind you, this is not entirely the actors fault. The problem is that Gere and Danes are the only ones that have characters that have even the slightest room in the movie to really give any depth. All other characters have either too little room in the movie to create any depth, or the character is such a cliché that it doesn't matter how hard the actors try.<br /><br />The director has a bit of a Se7en complex, but looking merely at the direction, I think he does an OK job.<br /><br />But the story. This is the kind of script that is bad in two ways. First of all it's a bad movie script. The characters are shallow (except for Gere's and Danes' characters), the villains are clichés and the actions of the characters is totally unbelievable. Besides this, the writers must have an agenda where they want to bring back our views and ethics a hundred years. It's the kind of movie that are saying that some criminals are still criminals, regardless of the fact that they have paid the price the society has given them. It's also the kind of movie that says, albeit only between the lines, that every form of sexual deviance should be punished without trial, judge or jury. And of course, according to the movie, everything that is not sex in the missionary position by a married couple is a sexual deviance.<br /><br />So, if you're going to film school and need an example of a bad script, or if you're writing scripts yourself and want an ego boost. See it. For everyone else, I recommend another movie.