"Everybody's Innocent. Didn't you know that?"

Rating: 10/10 (20 March 2008)

1994 was surely a memory of great movies. From blockbuster epics like Speed proving to audience that young actors like Keanu Reeves can dominate the spotlight to The Lion King where mixing Shakespeare with animation can be a triumph. It was also the year of memorable movies from "Forrest Gump" where retards and idiots can make a difference; "Pulp Fiction" was a wild ride filled with violence and language to make you have nightmares; "Quiz Show" questioned the stunts on game shows; "Four Weddings and A Funeral" proved to be a barrel of laughs and "The Shawshank Redemption" proves that drama takes place in all sides and all directions.
The films I placed in quotations where nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1995. "Gump" was the big winner taking home more awards and proving that a person of idiocy and a strong heart can change a person's life; "Pulp" won the original screenplay making Tarantino a star; "Quiz Show" and "Funerals" had less nominations but no wins. "Shawshank" is remembered for being a small movie with so many nominations that it didn't receive one award! Not One! There's a thing with certain movies where once they became failures, they become cult classics. The Shawshank Redemption is one of those movies.
Based on the novel by Stephen King, the film starts in the late 1940's about a hot shot banker by the name of Andy Dufrense (a superb Tim Robbins) who comes home drunk one night before finding his wife along with another man dead. By the time the cops arrive, they see that Andy has a gun with several bullets on the floor. They arrest him, but Andy didn't commit the crime where after a trial hearing, he is sent to Shawshank prison where his sentence is double life; one for each of his victims.
Andy is the fresh meat in Shawshank along with a couple of new inmates where they meet with Warden Norton (Bob Gunton), one real mean S.O.B. who believes in two things: Discipline and the bible. Norton's right hand man Captain Hadley (Clancy Brown) is the true shark of the institution where prisoners think of the warden as child's play compared to the captain who harasses all of the inmates. Andy meets several old inmates from Ellis Boyd Redding, or Red (played wonderfully by Morgan Freeman), who's doing time from murder where he's the inmates right hand man in terms of getting items from toothpicks to cigarettes and knowing everything about everyone. There's also Brooks (James Whitmore), the old-timer who plays an important part of the prison where everybody looks up to him. As each decade passes, Andy gets the prison involved in several little projects from helping the warden along with the guards and staff with their taxes to creating a public library for the prisoners where secrets are being kept from the hero. There's even a new inmate who enters Shawshank in the 1960's who knows the truth about Andy being set-up. Only time will tell when Andy will be released from prison along with having one of the most satisfying climaxes in movie or jail history.
This movie really deserves all the attention it earns.