Release Date: April 3
Director: Rupert Wyatt
Writers: Daniel Hardy and Rupert
Wyatt
Cinematographer: Philipp
Blaubach
Starring: Brian Cox, Joseph
Fiennes, Liam Cunningham, Seu Jorge
Studio Information: IFC Films,
102 mins.
The Escapist, directed by Rupert
Wyatt, is a high-octane, efficiently executed British film about a
prison break. The story runs along two tracks: One shows us the
escape itself, which begins with the film’s first shot, and the
other flashes back to gray-haired inmate Frank Perry (Brian Cox) and
his band of accomplices who are planning their flight to freedom.
Twisting together a pair of
contrapuntal timelines isn’t easy, unless, maybe, you’re William
Faulkner. Most others who try it end up with one story that’s
significantly more interesting than the other and a film that toddles
on uneven stilts. Often this ping-pong structure seems to encourage
storytellers to stretch one of the threads into a languorous dead
zone just to make its events line up properly with the action in the
other, but in this case, the two lines push each other along. You’d
think the good stuff would be in the escape, but the flashbacks feed
us context for the events we just saw or the ones we’re about to,
and I found that I looked forward to the switches because of the
satisfying way everything snapped together.
No one will mistake The Escapist
for Robert Bresson’s contemplative A Man Escaped nor Frank
Darabont’s sentimental favorite The Shawshank Redemption.
It’s swifter, grittier, and louder than the typical escape movie,
but it still falls firmly within the tradition of underground
breakouts. This maximum security prison is devoid of computers, TVs,
and high-tech weight machines, making it hard to pinpoint the exact
setting. And the stacked tiers of barred passageways, the master
light switch that echoes with a thunk, and the social spaces that
crawl with dangerous men all paint a picture of a classic stony
lonesome like Alcatraz. Only Perry’s flip clock situates the film
somewhere in the last 40 years, and if I were an expert in the field
of industrial laundering equipment, the giant tumble dryer might,
too. We get a few more specific clues near the end, but until then
it’s an abstract setting of pure, old-fashioned dirt, steel, and
torches. With a strong cast and strong sense of storytelling, Wyatt
and co-writer Daniel Hardy have combined those elements into an
elegant first feature.