The Escapist (2008 film)

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The Escapist is a prison break film starring Brian Cox, Joseph Fiennes, Dominic Cooper, Liam Cunningham, Seu Jorge, Damian Lewis and Steven Mackintosh. It is directed and co-written by Rupert Wyatt, and premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival to considerable acclaim.

[edit] Plot

Frank Perry (Cox, in a role written specifically for him) is a lifer and has long accepted that he’ll never see the outside again. A solid and phlegmatic character, he holds his own but neither attracts nor creates any trouble. Grief is far more likely to be started by the psychotic and drug-addled Tony (Macintosh), brother to the camp but ruthless head con Rizza (Lewis, who reportedly based his character's mannerisms on a mixture of Tony Blair and Chris Eubank). It is Rizza and Tony who rule the prison, rather than the guards themselves, a state of affairs which Wyatt has said came from his experiences at boarding school, where prefects rather than masters enforced discipline on an everyday basis.

However, when Frank receives a rare letter telling him that his cherished daughter is near death following an overdose, he starts to think about escaping, and fast. He’s got a plan and he needs help. Soon a mismatched crew of all the talents comes together, with Lenny Drake (Fiennes), Brodie (Cunningham), Viv Batista (Jorge) and Cox's new cellmate James Lacey (Cooper) each pitching in.

As is customary in the prison break genre, much attention is paid both to the themes of incarceration, freedom and the four R’s - redemption, release, regret and responsibility. Where The Escapist differs from other prison break movies is in its structure. Wyatt splices the preparations with the escape itself, cutting back and forth between the two (often with visually effective jump cuts).

This allows a final twist which is both intellectually and emotionally satisying; much of the action has been an internal drama playing out in one character's head, and certain actions have been less about escape than about self-sacrifice and atonement. The twist is based on that in the Ambrose Bierce story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.

Much of The Escapist was shot in Dublin's Kilmainham jail, where the open terraces and communal staircases give the feeling of a ghoulish horseshoe-shaped opera house populated by a colony of apes. A scene near the end is shot in the bascule chamber beneath Tower Bridge in London; coincidentally, exactly the same location where Wyatt's brother-in-law Boris Starling set the climax of his 2006 novel Visibility.