Actually, Ebert is quite Left of center so I don’t think an anti-death penalty film would yank his chain.
Unless it’s so poorly done that it portrays his side as a bunch of wackjobs.
As this one apparently did.
Ebert is pretty straightforward in his reveiw about his objection being ideological in nature. Disagreeing with the ideological foundation of a movie is certainly a legitimate reason for disliking it, so long as you are honest about that being the reason, as Ebert was in his review.
I think the only negative I could say about the ending was that all of the lose ends were tied up WAYYYY too fast. While you are trying to comprehend one scene, they quickly jump to the next and so on. I figured out that Gale and Constance were in on as soon as Gale couldn’t counter the governer with an innocent person who was sentenced to death, but I still wanted to know where Berlin fit into the whole thing, but they never really said. You could argue that it was set up as part of the whole double suicide plot, or that it was just the event that set the whole thing in motion.
Anyways, I think the movie can be enjoyed from the humanistic perspective (a brilliant man who has a passion for life suddenly loses it as everything he has worked for is wrongly ripped away from him) and now sees death as a gift. I don’t know how you can argue 0 stars for this movie, especially considering all of the crap that Hollywood spits out every year.