Monday, April 11, 2011

Since I saw the trailer for this movie, I was really interested. For some reason I really like Russel Crowe, and the plot actually was a rather interesting concept. The movie revolves around a man (Russell Crowe), his wife (Elizabeth Banks), and their son Luke. The premise of the story is that Crowe's wife suddenly is arrested and charged with murder of her co-worker. The evidence is not much but enough to convict her and send her to prison without much proof she was innocent. This leads to a kind of internal struggle in Crowe's character because he has to deal with his son not having a mother, as well as losing the love of his life.

This idea festers inside of Crowe's character, and the movie does an excellent job of showing each characters emotions due to the event. Eventually Crowe becomes engulfed with the notion that his wife was innocent, and starts researching ways of breaking her out of prison.

Now the movies does a good job with this. Crowe's character is only a teacher in community college, so he's decently intellectual but as far as knowledge of prison breaks and their associated strategies, he hasn't the slightest of clues. So the movie begins to show his acquisition of information, mostly starting with him consulting a local legend who escaped prison 7 times. After this, Crowe's character starts taking photographs of the surrounding buildings, keeping journals of information from when he visits his wife in prison, trying to look and find the one key to her escape.

In his journey, the movie does an excellent job of keeping the character grounded as he's not some teacher with an ex-military background who graduated top in his class who can kill a man with one hand and shoot with pin point accuracy. So of course Crowe makes some mistakes, which in turn hints the police force that something is up.

When Crowe's character is ready and the breakout begins, I couldn't help but to be on the edge of the seat watching how it all unfolds and seeing whether he was going to be caught or not. Again, the movie does an excellent job of keeping the characters grounded while Crowe and his wife make some very daring escape moves but nothing like an over-the-top Bruce Willis movie. This portion of the movie lasted surprisingly long but was very satisfying.

All in all, I was rather surprised at this movie. I think it had an interesting plot and excellent story, and it was a story that was believable and did not cross the line over into "that's crazy so it could never happen." I mean, what would you do if your wife was locked away for prison for the rest of her life? This is the struggle Crowe's character faces on and off and what eventually leads him to give up everything, and try to pave a new life for his family.

11 comments:

  1. never even heard of it. i need to check it out now

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  2. I didn't see it advertised, just saw it with a friend who had... It was good!

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  3. will check this movie out later, sounds good

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  4. i might have to see this one!

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  5. I really really wanna see this. I love the cast and the premise looks outstanding and your review has just strengthened my resolve to see it. Following.

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  6. From what you're saying it sounds pretty good. I'll check trailers and maybe I'll rent this eventually. Thanks for the review!

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