**1/2 (Out of four)

Rating: 5/10 (21 April 1999)

Frank Darabont's "The Shawshank Redemption" is a film of pretentious platitudes and obvious intentions. Based on Stephen King's short story "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption", the film stars Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne, a banker wrongly accused of murdering his adulterous wife and her lover. Morgan Freeman delivers a much-deserved Academy-Award nominated performance as the hardened Red, the convict responsible for smuggling cigarettes into the penitentiary whose genuine depth allows him to form a friendship with Andy not based on the macho rules of the prison yard (Andy's demeanor is in face so falsely naive that many of the prisoners bet on him to be the first under pressure) but on a continuing sense of willpower and motivation in a place that genuinely lacks the atmosphere for such human emotions.
And yet whereas "The Shawshank Redemption" is in itself an honorable predilection of prison life and shows an understanding of the human spirit which is somehow lacking in the more recent prison movies (most notably Tom Selleck's "An Innocent Man" and Sylvester Stallone's "Lock Up"), the film is deemed exceptional only by your willingness to surrender to Darabont's predictable machinations. Darabont may be a talented screenwriter, and some of his creations here (such as the character played by William Sadler, who comes across during an inventory inspection a copy of "The Count of Monte Cristo" by Alexander...Dumbass) are unmistakeably human, his portrayal of the Bible-thumping warden (Bob Gunton) cannot resist but to relegate itself to stereotype. The film's real downfall is in Tim Robbins' performance, who despite his squeaky-clean cherub face cannot project the inspiration needed to give this film its realistic element. And yet this is not a bad movie, just certainly not the best movie of all time. Some images of the movie will continue to stay with me: the cold-hearted sexual depravity of "the Sisters"; and in the infamous shot beautifully and rigidly painted by cinematographer Roger Deakins ("Fargo"), Dufresne basking in a downpour upon entering freedom. Unfortunately, the film isn't cohesive enough to warrant any more of those moments.