A good movie

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but since I always had a weak spot for Robert Redford, I was quite eager to check it out. Well, I have to admit that I had no clue what this movie was about before watching the damned thing. As a result, at first, I thought it was a gritty drama about a new prison inmate who was trying to survive in one of the worst jails I have ever seen. Of course, it turned out that Brubaker was not just some ordinary inmate, he was in fact the new warden who was spending a couple of weeks undercover as an inmate to discover his prison from within. Well, even though I understand Brubaker’s logic for going for this strategy and even though I understand that it did look pretty bad-ass, I think this approach actually pretty much derailed the whole thing. Indeed, the whole idea was to give a gritty realistic look on a really messed-up prison by showing that the corrupt people running this jail might be even just as rotten as the inmates were. However, it was just so far-fetched that the new warden would try to get acquainted this way with his new workplace, seriously, it was borderline ridiculous. On top of that, was this undercover operation really necessary? Basically, it was just to show how unconventional Brubaker was but it was eventually rather pointless. Above all, it vastly contradicted the rest of the movie which felt much more realistic. Still, the rest of the movie was solid, especially if you think that during the next 40 years, the whole prison thing has become a multi-billion dollar business in the US with 10 times more inmates. Anyway, to conclude, the more I think about it, the more I believe that this movie didn’t really work but I guess it was still a decent watch and it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.