Well-polished cliches

Rating: 6/10 (22 July 2000)

The evangelical adoration this film has earned is lost on me. Like so many popular films of recent years, "Shawshank" is an obvious, cliche-riddled epic that's won fans because it plays it safe. Characters are either saintly or satanic. There's no room for shades of gray. Sure its sumptuously filmed. A $50 million budget can do that. Add the always solid Morgan Freeman, a paper-thin moral about hope, and you've got a film longing to be loved. Obviously, plenty of people do.
But compared to Freeman, Tim Robbins' vanilla performance as the long-suffering innocent (dare I say Christ-like) man trapped in purgatory comes off bland. Clancy Brown as the sadistic prison guard is the worst cliche of the all. When you toss in the obligatory prison rapes, the corrupt warden, and James Whitmore (who is very good) as the veteran inmate unprepared for life outside the institution, you've got a predictable film that only snaps to life near its plot-holed conclusion.

Worse of all, Frank Darabont directs the works at half-speed. This is a painfully overlong concoction.
In time, "The Shawshank Redemption" will be regarded as a well-crafted but shallow prison film.