If the title, "The Chamber", is meant to be a pun, it's a pretty good one. There's the judge's "chamber" where decisions are made, and, at the other end, the gas "chamber" where those plans are executed along with the inmate to whom those judgments were passed down.<br /><br />In some ways, the title is the niftiest part of the movie. For John Gresham, whose intentions are always benign, it's a pretty weak story. (It shouldn't be, with William Goldman doing the adaptation.) It's Gresham's most pedantic. Condemned are both racist violence and the death penalty, the former more so than the latter.<br /><br />That's the bothersome part of the plot. Okay, Gene Hackman does his best with the role of the lifetime KKK bomber who takes the rap for the real killer of the two Jewish children. But he's miscast. Hackman is not an unreflective, defiant, redneck racist and murderer. JAMES WOODS is that character. Hackman is absolutely first-rate (without being a bravura actor) when he gets the right role, whether it's villainous or heroic, but he's never been good with accents and, man, does this role call for one.<br /><br />At that, he gives the strongest performance in the film, with support from a couple of seasoned players like Harve Presnell. Gresham's relatively innocent young idealist, Chris O'Donnell, does not convince. He looks the part alright but his voice and gestures suggest a weakness that the character shouldn't have. And he's the main man. Some of the supporting players, like Bo Jackson as Sergeant Packer, can't seem to act at all.<br /><br />The climax involves one of those detailed execution scenes I've come to loathe. I don't understand why they're there. In a short cinematic exercise in the early 1940s, Orson Welles used the first-person camera to guide the viewer into a gas chamber. Then, in the mid-50s, there was a detailed execution of Susan Hayward in "I Want to Live." Then there was a hiatus for another twenty years or so before these tasteless scenes came back with a vengeance. Here we get to see Gene Hackman gassed to death, the foamy spittle dripping from his mouth as he expires. But what does this tell us? That execution is horrifying and painful? What else is new? So what do these scenes tell us that we don't already know? I understand some TV channels are negotiating with Texas to film executions for broadcast. (How long before the opportunity to pull the switch is auctioned on eBay?) What kind of audience do the writers and directors think they're addressing? <br /><br />The musical score is by Carter Burwell and it's fairly conventional, full of deep and ominous chords. He's a talented composer who has done quirkier work in better films like "Fargo" and "The Spanish Prisoner." Judging from the movies that are based on his novels, John Gresham is in the not-uncommon position of being at odds with the values of the society he grew up in. A lot of other marginalized writers have also been prompted to explain the sins of their culture's past to the rest of us, beginning maybe with Nathaniel Hawthorne and running through the Southern giants of American literature and playwriting -- Tennessee Williams, Faulkner, and the rest. Gresham fits the mold and his work is interesting, but this is a failed effort. The legal aspects are confusing, the characters a bit muddled, and the story itself either too simple or too complex, depending on how you look at it.