ultraclay dot com

Good lord, this movie is never going to end. It’s a prison movie, not exactly like The Great Escape except that nearly every prison movie (that isn’t on late night cable) is basically the same. Steve McQueen plays a prisoner that won’t give up trying to escape. The story is more brutal and soul crushing than the other. It includes what seems like an eternity of watching McQueen deteriorate in solitary confinement with little food. Dustin Hoffman co-stars. Maybe I’m just tired, but the whole thing just seemed to meander. Apparently Papillon was a real person who wrote a book about the story, which may explain some of the excess the story contains. I try not to judge older movies by the conventions that didn’t exist at the time, but let’s just say nothing really surprised me in the movie. The relationship between Papillon and Hoffman’s Degas was complicated and interesting, but also seemed to go this way and that with little direction.
::c::