One of the Most Overrated Films Ever Made!

Rating: 2/10 (7 May 2012)

It seems that every time a movie comes out with an exceedingly positive and uplifting message or story, the average moviegoer is blind to any other problems or shortcomings the film might have. Every moment of this film feels phony and hollow. The character of Red (Morgan Freeman) is just a vehicle to keep the plot moving and doesn't seem to even exist as a whole person. His narration is embarrassing with its phony regional dialect and forced folksiness. The prison life depicted, while brutal and violent in a few scenes, is overromanticized by the picturesque cinematography and florid music. The plot is fairly clever but, like bad American television, everything that happens is in service of the plot. There's no behavior from the characters that doesn't help bring you to the film's stunningly maudlin final scene. And there are logistical problems, like the fact that you can't make a hole in a thick metal sewer pipe by hitting it with a rock three times. They could have solved this problem by just showing a shot of a clock moving forward. The best character is a relatively brief and peripheral one, Brooks (James Whitmore). Whitmore doesn't seem to know he's in such a shallow, contrived movie and gives the character a realism and three-dimensionality the other characters don't have in his short time on screen. In the montage-type scene in which he's trying to cope with life out of prison, however, he suddenly seems less intelligent and more of a stereotype of a befuddled old man. Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne is somewhere between good and mediocre, seeming to force weird expressions onto his face like he just read the character description in the script for the first time. Bob Gunton as Warden Norton is over-the-top and seemingly one-dimensional, but it works because Bible-thumpers are often over-the-top and seemingly one-dimensional. He's actually believable and interesting to watch. The prison guard Hadley (Clancy Brown) is realistically sadistic, but his type of comically crude sexual language sounds too contemporary for the time. The final scene is just so unrealistically over-the-top happy and sunny it's an insult to the viewer's intelligence and, I think, ruins much of the film. This film obviously has developed a huge following over the years, but I think that's largely just because of it's sentiment of hopefulness and positivity, and that doesn't necessarily indicate a well-written, well-executed, well-acted film. Some of the worst crap in theatres and on television has a hopeful, inspiring, uplifting message. Of course a film doesn't have to depict a realistic world. In fact, I like surrealism in movies. But it should at least show an interesting version of a world, and to keep any intelligent viewer's attention the characters have to be fully realized, seemingly existing in a world outside of the film's plot.