This entry was posted on Sunday, April 8th, 2007 at 2:34 pm and is filed under A, Action, I. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Director: Peter Yates
Starring: Tom Selleck, F. Murray Abraham, Laila Robins, David Rasche, Richard Young, Badja Djola, M.C. Gainey, Bruce Young
I’m going to need some help with this. Let’s make a list of all the good movies that Tom Selleck has made. There is Magnum P.I. oops, wait, that’s TV. There was the Indiana Jones rip-off, High Road To China. Oops, wait, that one sucked. There was Three Men and a Baby. It was ok. Then he made a prison movie – a genre that has more bad movies than a university film festival. Against all odds, though, this is a decent movie. The story is formulaic and the characters are stereotypes, but the prison scenes are well-written and engaging. Selleck’s performance breaks down in a couple spots, but is off set by an excellent role for Oscar winner, F. Murray Abraham.
Tom Selleck is Jimmie Rainwood, an airplane maintenance manager living an idyllic life when an address foul up leads to a couple of corrupt vice cops kicking in his door, then framing him to cover up their embarrassing mistake. Jimmie indignantly refuses to plea bargain his way out and soon finds himself out of his depth as an inmate in a maximum security prison and has to learn how to survive there. Luckily, a canny inmate, Virgil (Abraham) decides to give him the game plan, for his own reasons, while Jimmie‘s wife, Kate (Laila Robins) fights for his innocent husband‘s release, with the crooked cops watching her progress.
It’s no classic, but it is a good movie for those who get a kick out of self-righteous prison movies. If The Shawshank Redemption has been shanghaied by witless Hollywood executives, the end result would have looked kind of like this.
