Do I not get it or something?
It just felt like an individualist white middle class mans fantasy of how he’d totally outgrind and outsmart the prison system by doing epic taxes and being a good person
just befriend the prison guards!
play beautiful cultured classical music to these poor barbarous inmates as an act of # la resistance
then, totally own the corrupt system by exposing them to newspapers… the police and judicial system are otherwise perfect so the prison commissioner will kill himself rather than face the HARSH HARSH CONSEQUENCES that one could receive in America for money laundering… notwithstanding that the money laundering is chump change in comparison to the slave wage labour that the inmates are made to perform…
Morgan Freeman speaks in hope platitudes for the entire movie
Is this movie not just about how all you need to do is grin and grind to escape your hellish life?
Then people jerk it off for ‘showing the humanity of prisoners for the first time EVER in cinema and not treating prison rape as a joke’ - surely you can only find such a thing to be true if you have only ever seen about 5 movies in your life? Or is that just a pure indictment of the Hollywood system - that it only ever makes garbage visible?
Am I being cynical? Was I just in a bad mood?
Utterly cheesy and without charm.
The movie going out of it’s way to let the audience know that the guy has been innocently convicted just takes all the interest ouf of the whole thing. This being the all-time IMDb top movie is pretty telling for just how wide as an ocean-deep as a puddle that sites understanding of film was. Thank God for letterboxed (which also sucks in tons of different ways).
If you are in the mood for other prison films I’d recommend Grand Illusion by Jean Renoir (although that films pre-WW2 humanism could definitely rub someone the wrong way if they’re not in the mood for it) or Reform School Girls which is an absolute exploitation masterpiece.
Exactly! I forgot to mention that part about his innocence!
It’s like - ok well you should empathise with this guy because he’s innocent, not because the prison system is inhumane.
Dog Pound is probably the best prison movie I’ve seen. It’s about two boys in Canadian juvenile detention. One is in for getting caught selling drugs, the other for assault (on multiple people, including a cop). Absolutely gut wrenching ending, though. It’s much more bleak and probably a better display of the justice system.
Check CWs before hand if you have any problems with that sort of thing. It’s a hard watch because they’re also children and shouldn’t be in prison.