Good but overrated

Rating: 6/10 (15 March 2006)

First of all I am by no means a Shawshank hater nor I'm I here to troll the film or its fans for it being ranked this high on the IMDb top 250. Shawshank I must say is a rather enjoyable watch with a decent performance from Tim Robbins, a particular good one from Morgan Freeman, a decent storyline and a nice ending. However that said I would not put it anywhere near my top 50 movies list and I'm pretty sure I could name at least 30 films, twenty of which are not even ranked in the 250 that are IMO way better than Shawshank in their use of story telling and making you study them in your head even after you've watched them many times. It would perhaps be safe to say that what ever it does for many other people it just didn't do for me. The story was fairly predictable from start to finish and although I did appreciate its ending I found it to be too much your typical Hollywood sort of ending where every things happy and all loose ends have been tied up etc. I've now seen this movie four times and I must say I still find it to be very overrated, when I see it voted number two of all time then I think of how there are so many other movies out there not even in the 250. Oh well I guess popularity polls can never be just the way one would like them to be. Overall I give The Shawshank Redemption 6/10 stars I would have given it a seven or a eight only with the amount of high votes and rankings its got over the years on this site, I just felt it wasn't in need of such charity. As stated above a very enjoyable prison drama but just nowhere near in the same league as The Godfather, Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings trilogies. But hey thats only my opinion and thats what makes us all different isn't it?