ScreenWize

The classic movie approach to the prison breakout is to follow first the planning of the escape and then its execution. Once we’ve got to know the characters involved and the reasons for their need to escape, we’re ready to support them through bars, walls, tunnels and locked doors – and we become as distressed as they do when things go wrong. In The Escapist, director Rupert Wyatt (who also co-wrote the screenplay with Daniel Hardy) opens with the break out already underway and creatively cuts back and forth in time between the escape and its planning, interposing a third storyline in between the two - about one crim’s desire to see his daughter a last time. It’s a fractured, stylish and tense affair built around a band of great performances, and the film’s greatest strength is its terrifyingly subtle portrayal of the power plays that operate inside the quietly brutal all male world of cells and bars.

Veteran actor Brian Cox is Frank Perry – locked away for life in a grim British prison full of tough men and mind-numbingly inflexible rules. When he hears of his daughter’s illness he is determined to escape, and begins plotting the way out with the help of fighter Lenny (Joseph Fiennes), drug-maker Batista (Seu Jorge) and friend Brody (Liam Cunningham) who worked in the nearby tunnels that could lead them all to freedom. Blocking their way out is not guards but the savage politics of prison life – with top dog Rizza (Damian Lewis) and his viscous brother Tony (Steven Macintosh) controlling everything that happens on the inside. When Frank is suddenly allocated a new young cellmate (Dominic Cooper) who comes to attention of Tony and Rizza, things start to go wrong.

Add to this strong cast some excellent music and sound design and a truly claustrophobic panopticon-style prison design (the film was shot in infamous Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin) and you have the basis for a visceral break for freedom affair. Yet with all three narrative strands in play as the movie speeds towards its climactic ending, director Wyatt opts for a surprising – and perhaps overly dramatised - conclusion. Freedom is always a tricky concept for the prison genre when we’ve spend so much story time on the inside, and I’m not convinced Wyatt’s view of freedom will satisfy. The journey there, though, is well worth the ride.

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Filed Under: Reviews by Simon