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One of the first scenes of The Escapist shows us the group of inmates who are about to break out of the prison they're being held in, and it then pauses with a shot on each of these inmates to reveal the length of the sentence each of them is serving. This scene is deceptive because it promises a few things that aren't delivered over the course of the film's running time. It promises solid character development for each of these individuals, and it also promises a set of suspenseful break-out scenes.
The first segment of The Escapist is handled poorly, with bad editing transitions from one character to another without enough exposition in terms of who each person is. Thankfully, we soon get enough development on our main character, Frank Perry (Brian Cox) and on his cell mate, Lacey (Dominic Cooper), so that's a credit to the film, even if it still doesn't develop the other supporting characters decently enough.
The film intercuts between scenes of the break-out and scenes of these characters lives while imprisoned and of their plan to escape. The curious thing here is that the latter scenes are far more interesting than the former ones. The break-out scenes are lacking in suspense and don't really gain any momentum until the very end of the film, so all they do is distract from the scenes that depict the day-to-day life in jail, which are handled very well and are also surprisingly realistic.
Frank has decided he needs to escape from prison because he has found out that his daughter is a junkie who recently had an overdose episode which was nearly fatal. This is a nice twist in the sense that it will make the audience sympathize with the main character, as he's not your average prisoner who wants to escape merely for selfish reasons. However, the fatal flaw here is that the topic of Franks' concern for his daughter is hardly fleshed-out during the film, and it's not until the climax begins that we're reminded of it, in the film's most dramatically effective scene (which features a prison visit in which no words are exchanged because they're simply not necessary). As great as this scene is, it seems wrong that the filmmakers waited so long to have this issue resurface. This is also the point at which the intensity of the break-out scenes finally picks up (with a suspenseful sequence involving a train), but this also feels like too little too late.
Throughout the movie, one of the things I was worried about was that, in choosing to intercut the break-out scenes with everything that happened prior to the break-out, the filmmakers let us know which inmates made it out and which ones didn't. This is particularly problematic in the fact that there's a moment that we think Frank's roommate Lacey will be killed by top bad guy Rizza (Damian Lewis), but then we remember that Lacey is one of the guys in the group that's escaping, so it reveals from the very beginning that he couldn't have been killed. Of course, the film's big twist at the end puts a spin on this, as it's one of those twists that turns everything on its head. As much as the surprise element that this brings is effective, the filmmakers choose to go for the much overused technique of running through several scenes we had seen throughout the film and explaining what was real and what was imagined. This is a technique that is hardly ever performed effectively when it's employed in movies, and The Escapist definitely doesn't represent one of the few exceptions in terms of this.
Brian Cox is a great veteran actor with a heck of a lot of range. He can go from playing the deliciously evil Agamemnon in Troy to a thoroughly magnanimous character in Match Point. He does what he can with his title role in The Escapist, even though he doesn't get nearly as much room to shine as an actor of his caliber should. The strongest performance is given by the handsome Dominic Cooper who's a perfect embodiment of fear and trauma, thanks to the fact that his character is the one with the strongest arc in the film. Last year, I was somewhat disappointed with Cooper, who got a thankless role in the terrible Mamma Mia! and an underdeveloped character in The Duchess, but here, we're able to get a much better gander of his talent. Another noteworthy performance is that of Steven Mackintosh as Tony, an awesomely slimy villain, and a great representation of how ruinous life in prison can be.
The final twist will be hailed by many as a brilliant way of blindsiding the audience and as an ingenious way of providing a double meaning to the film's ostensibly simple title. But that's giving too much credit to a movie that is really more deceptive for the sake of being deceptive rather than to impart some sort of emotional insight in its final moments. The break-out scenes are too dull and generic to make the movie feel like a simple-minded, fun caper, and the dramatic moments aren't strong enough at all to make this comparable to something like The Shawshank Redemption, which is a vastly superior film.
5/10
