The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Directed by: Frank Darabont
Starring: Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman, Bob Gunton
This is a really good movie. Man, I can’t believe that four of the five movies I’ve reviewed today were really good movies. I’m burned out on ’em, I gotta go watch some direct-to-video thing about vampires eating zombies or something to recuperate.
Shawshank Redemption is about a man who’s sent to prison for life for killing his wife and the man she was cheating on him with. He has a tough time in prison, but he eventually makes some friends, and uses his intelligence to get a job at the prison library, and also to do the taxes of the guards and warden. I’m going to spoil the ending of this here, so if you haven’t seen it and somehow don’t know the ending, just skip to the next paragraph or stop reading. One day, he disappears, and nobody knows what happened to him… until they find out that he had been digging a tunnel out of the jail behind a poster he has hanging up in his cell. On the outside, he takes all the money that he had been skimming from the warden by being sneaky about his taxes, and then sends in a report on all the illegal activities of the warden. When his friend finally gets parole, he finds the spot the guy told him about and goes to Mexico to join him.
I’ll admit, most of my “knowledge” about prison comes directly from this film, and also from The Green Mile, also based off a Steven King story, and also directed by Darabont. Both Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman are amazing in this film, and it’s such a compelling story that it’s still enjoyable even after you know the secret twist ending. I must’ve seen this movie four or five times now, and I liked it just as much this time as I did the first. That’s a really unique quality for a film to have, at least in my opinion, and it’s why Shawshank has a very rightful place as one of the better movies of all time.
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