Movie Review: The Escapist

So you know how you're watching Prison Break and go to make a cup of tea and come back and someone's turned it over to Film 4 and they're showing The Shawshank Redemption again?

No?

Well go and see The Escapist and you might know what we mean.

There's nothing really that wrong with this stylish if derivative tale of corruption and redemption in British prison, but we can't help but feel that we've heard and seen it all before.

Not through any sense of reality, you understand. There's nothing real about the prison environment that first-time director Rupert Wyatt conjures up for us.

His experience and subsequent recreation of incarceration is based, as is ours, on the truths and motifs laid out in film and television.

So the prison itself, rather than evoking the morbid but inhabitable white washedness of Porridge, becomes much more akin to a Vietcong POW camp that Sly Stallone may have found himself in circa 1984.

As such we are treated to the mandatory forced bum fun in the shower, a well 'ard bloke who runs things on the inside (played by an on-form Damien Lewis) and the quiet retiring con with a shot at redemption played by the always excellent Brian Cox.

As the story, told with clever use of a nonlinear plot structure, unfolds you can't help but think that in the British legal system Cox would probably have never served jail time anyway. Well he reads and that, loves his daughter. He must be alright really.

However, no one can say that The Escapist is not an entertaining yarn.

With naturalistic and empathetic performances from Joseph Fiennes and Liam Cunningham to help this engaging if slightly improbable tale along, it serves as a solid enough debut for the director, who will go on to better things.

However like Brian Cox as he emerges from a Andy Dufresnesqe subterranean cesspit reborn and clean only to meet another familiar plot development, you may wonder if sitting through The Escapist is worth your while.

[story by Tom Henry]