Average at best

Rating: Null/10 (11 February 2000)

This is another of those films that inexplicably gets the reputation of being the best film ever made and a kind of rabid mass psychosis by suggestion seems to result. I'm amazed at the number of times this turns up whenever people do a top ten list. Unfailingly, like the proverbial black penny, up it pops. Yawn. I think kids need to be forcefully tied to a chair and made to watch some film history. Why on earth does every single thing Stephen King inflicts on the reading public have to be made into a film? They'll be making his shopping list next. It would be okay if he was an interesting author but the majority of what he turns out is handed down pulp detritus. This film is a staggering three hours long and full of cliched bathetic corn although freeman does his best. Robbins is an average actor and his character is a cypher at best. The plot is very silly. Are they really trying to tell us that no one would check a very prominent item in a cell for fifteen years? There must have been a lot of noise filtering through and a draught which would rattle it like mad. I'm sure that's the first place they'd check behind for a marijuana stash. And didn't prisoners get moved around regularly from cell to cell? The come-uppance of the staff was hugely unlikely too, destroying any poignancy and good will the film may have stirred up earlier. It was daft stuff. And we mustn't forget the old stalwart of hack directing, the thunderstorm to highten...well, I don't know what really, it's hard to see with all that flashing. I suspose it's stirring for some to see a crane shot of a man holding his arms to the heavens. It's a highlight of their lives. I call it film making by numbers. And there are a lot of numbers in this film. It's one virtue is it doesn't duck prison rape.