Movie Review: Shawshank Redemption

            What could be more interesting that seeing what the majority of people do not get a chance to experience: Life inside a maximum security prison?  Shawshank Redemption, starring Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins, shows a look at how prisoners survive when almost their entire lives have been spent behind bars.  Andy Dupree (Tim Robbins) is given two life sentences for supposedly murdering his wife and her lover.  Once he arrives at Shawshank prison, he immediately has to start adjusting to life on the inside.  For the first couple of years he gets brutally assaulted by both guards and inmates, but soon finds his place with a group of people including Morgan Freeman’s character, Red, a man who can smuggle and reasonable item inside of the jail.  He tells Andy, “I’m a man who knows how to locate certain things from time to time."  

            The acting in this movie is some of the best I have ever seen.  All of the main characters are very developed and each one has their own unique and important characteristics.  This keeps the movie very interesting considering the majority of it is filmed behind the dull, gray walls of a jail cell.  Andy and Red’s relationship is especially interesting because their roles to each other switch throughout the movie.  At first Red seems to look out for Andy and help him adjust to the life of a prisoner.  As the movie goes on though, it appears that Red begins to follow Andy’s lead.

            The best audience for this film would be anyone that is taken in by interesting dialogue and relationships between people, not so much action and violence that typically grabs people’s attention.  Overall this is a classic movie that I feel anyone can enjoy.