The Escapist. (spoilers)

No not the website with Yahtzee on but instead the movie dubbed the 'British Prison Break'. I also finished Avatar (the cartoon) yesterday but decided I'd rather review a movie since that is what the blog is about really, enjoy!

I'm also gonna apologise in advance as to how bad this review will probably be. I got banned from my mac for a while so I'm forced to do this at college which means that a lot of time has passed since I watched this movie (well not a lot of time but over 12 hours). I'm used to doing reviews within an hour of watching the movie, see. So yeah.

The Escapist is apparently a prison movie constructed entirely from prison movie clichés, honestly though I'm not sure if that is true or not since I haven't really seen many prison movies in my life. It’s not like I don’t like the genre, I just happened to have not seen many. But yes, expect an escape plan, a corrupt hierarchy, drug use, weapons made from nothing, horrible shower moments and all the rest. The Escapist has it all. So wait, I guess they were right, well they are certainly prison clichés, not sure about prison movie clichés though.

And in the end the movie turned out to be really entertaining, helped massively by its great cast. But I can't say I honestly liked this movie since it trolled me with its ending.

Yeah about that ending, any movie that turns around and says 'it was all in his head' is a bad fucking movie. An ending is integral to a narrative, yes a good ending is hard to create but it’s not hard to make a decent ending, instead you chickened out and used a generic bad ending that you probably found while searching Google. I don't think a bad ending makes for a bad film or a good ending makes a good film but it helps. That kind of ending is almost as bad as 'he woke up and it was all a dream'. What is the point of watching a movie where they turn around and say none of it happened? Even more so, if the escape was all in his head then why were sequences from it spliced into scenes across the movie? That just screws up the passing of time in the narrative. It just makes the awful ending come across as totally random and it's just terrible writing and mistakes like this shouldn’t make it across into a movie, it’s just such an amazingly stupid move that seems impossible to not have been noticed by the people who wrote the movie. About the only saving grace to this ending is when Brian Cox's character picks up a top in the underground, a top we later see his wife wearing. We're then left confused as to how that is possible until the twist comes around and for a moment at least you’re impressed. Well I was.

The last huge paragraph has probably already put you off the movie but I’m still going to tell you what I liked. There are awesome sequences as a guy makes drugs. And a sequence where a guy gets his tooth punched out of his mouth in slow motion. The escape plan is both beautiful and amazingly put together, edited and put across on screen (but from what I’ve read this was probably a stolen rather than created idea). The characters are great and the prison is really really horrible, like prisons should be.

One other thing I will complain about though is how cheap the movie feels, through clever editing most of the more intense moments are off screen (like when the guy cuts off his thumb you only hear it or how during the fight the camera always cuts away just as the punch is about to hit so you don’t see it etc). They’d probably give an excuse like, ‘it’s art’ but I’d just say 'that's bullshit'. I’d expect it from a student movie but not a proper movie like this. Then again they probably blew their budget on the cast...

So should you watch it? The cast is fantastic (as I said like three times haha) and if you like prison movies and don't like this movie then there must be something wrong with you because it has more prison clichés (who knows about prison movie clichés though) than you can shake a stick at. It's just a shame the ending kicks you in the nuts.

Think about it!

-Locke