Cavils about the length are pointless -- Darabont uses the time wisely, extracting the essentials of King's story, originally serialized in six parts, and moving the proceedings along at a good clip. Any further compression would be a little gaudy. The story includes no fewer than three grisly executions, and shortening the film would mean shortening the spaces in between those scenes, making the story feel more morbid than it really is, and maybe even bloodthirsty.

There's also no way for the film to adequately answer the criticism that its vision of death row in the Deep South of the 1930s bears no resemblance to reality. True enough, and if "realism" is your bag, you'll just have to go elsewhere.

King's story deals mainly with an enormous black man named John Coffey (Michael Clark Duncan) who arrives on Death Row after being found with the bloody, raped bodies of two little girls in his arms. The prison block, known as the "Green Mile" because of the lime-green color of the floor, is run by Paul Edgecomb as a tight, clean ship where the guards are expected to play fair with the inmates. That leads to strange little bonds being formed, like the one between the guards and Cajun prisoner Edouard Delacroix (Michael Jeter), or between Delacroix and a feisty little mouse known as Mr. Jingles.

So Edgecomb is particularly curious about Coffey, a hulking, simple-minded child-killer who professes a fear of the dark and seems perpetually on the verge of tears. His suspicions turn out to be well-founded -- Coffey is a most unusual man, and his presence on the Mile raises a series of moral dilemmas for the men who are expected to lead him to his death, not least among them the possibility that Coffey isn't guilty as charged. In fact, he may be an honest-to-God miracle worker.

From Hanks on down, the whole epic is exceedingly well-acted -- especially by Duncan, in what could have been a completely amorphous (and borderline offensive) role -- and Darabont directs sensitively and intelligently. Notwithstanding a few awkward stretches (mainly involving a subplot about the prison warden and his ill wife), Darabont never lost me, despite the over-the-top portrayals of the bad guys (one's a rookie guard with political connections, played by Doug Hutchinson, the other a new, livewire inmate, played by Sam Rockwell) and the requisite presence of some adorable codgers in the modern-day framing device.

The worst I can say about this thoroughly decent movie is that it botches some of the most important scenes -- an execution gone wrong is meant to be harrowing, but plays instead like some direct-to-video horror movie that you might find on HBO in the middle of the night, just gussied up to Hollywood standards -- and suffers elsewhere from an unrelenting, homogenized sweetness that panders to the audience.

Specifically, I found aspects of the film's take on the supernatural to be sunny wish fulfillment smacking of New Age sentiment and bordering on the irresponsible. One of the tactics King's stories have always used to get close to his readers is cracking open their protective shells, forcing them to confront the nasty bits inside. He does some of that in The Green Mile, too. But in the Darabont version, even the nastiness is sugar-coated.