Jack Nicholson plays McMurphy as if he were born to it in this hilarious and heartbreaking classic.

Rating: 10/10 (25 November 2009)

McMurphy is an Irish-American brawler found culpable of battery and gambling. He is a Korean War veteran who was also held as a prisoner of war. He is sentenced to a fairly short prison term, and decides to have himself declared insane in order to be shifted to a mental institution, where he expects to serve the rest of his time in comfort and luxury.
Randle Patrick McMurphy appears on the well-organized and claustrophobic scene of the psychiatric ward like a bolt from the blue in the movie, "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest." He is a sharp-witted, elegant, aggressive, and an energetic person who always challenges the status quo from day one. He introduces himself to all and sundry in the ward, shakes hands and fills the silence with loud laughter. He is perhaps not mentally ill; he has chosen to be sent to the psychiatric hospital because he did not like to work on the prison farm, where he had six months to go before his discharge. The desirability of the psychiatric hospital for him was the idea of enjoying better food and a trouble-free lifestyle. This is not exactly what he actually gets.
McMurphy has brought a touch of normalcy in the general atmosphere of the ward with his sense of humor and rebellious voice. He instantly engages in a long, hopeless, and endless battle with a "Big Nurse". What Nurse Ratched wants is a group of passive and silent men who do not offend or query how she has ordered things. It is their incarceration, voluntary or otherwise, upon which her job and role in life depends. Hence, McMurphy is the ultimate threat—a nonconformist who encourages the residents into a desire for action. He provokes them up out of the lifelessness and dullness in which they have been dwelling. In fact, he provides them with the creation of a treatment to their problems. The more victorious McMurphy is at disturbing the status quo, the more severe the battle becomes between him and Nurse Ratched.
McMurphy is a very funny character but the humor ends when he discovers that Big Nurse has complete control over his fate—over what treatment he receives and when he is discharged. What starts as a boisterous mutiny against authority becomes a calamity. McMurphy is repetitively subjected to electric shock therapy. He manages to joke about it and to gather the strength to arrange a fishing expedition for some of the men. Finally, he makes a plan to escape one night but before that he invites everyone to a night of drinking and partying in the ward. The drunken orgy, complete with prostitutes, turns into a debacle and becomes the cause of his demise. Big Nurse comes to know about the party and sends him for electro-shock treatment. He returns lobotomized, as a human vegetable, after the therapy. All the lights in his bright mind and brave personality have been extinguished due to continual electro-shock therapy. Afterwards, his trusted friend "Chief" asphyxiates him with a pillow and saves half-living McMurphy from sinking into a vegetative existence. In spite of his final degradation to a vegetative state, he wins the fight for freedom that he has fought so courageously.