I'm not sure why anyone would really want to watch a movie like this. This film is generally getting good reviews, but these seem to be from Gary Oldman fans who would probably rave about him in anything. It's a grim account of life in a mental prison. The prisoners are kept in squalor (surprise, surprise), mistreated by brutal guards (ditto) until one man exposes the goings-on with the inevitable Hollywood denouement.
The film starts with an unnecessary voice-over from Oldman's character, but this technique is soon dropped leaving us disorientated - why does he go berserk? - perhaps we needed that voice over after all... A major weakness of the plot is that the hero is someone who at the beginning of the film runs amok in his neighborhood with a gun. Say what...? this is the hero...? Well, he has a tough job to endear himself to us after that, and he doesn't make it. This undermines the basic purport of the film, namely to make a hero out of Oldman's character. To further alienate us, Oldman is made to sport the most execrable beard in movie history for the whole second half of the film.
Presumably we are meant to get some satisfaction from the ending, but several decades after the event, does anyone really give a dang about it? We know conditions in these institutions, and everywhere else, were bad in the past. As this is a true story, the ending is also a foregone conclusion and is brought about very abruptly and clumsily in the last minute of the film. A movie of these credentials should not have you thinking at the end "oh, is that it then?".
There is not a single laugh in the movie (apart from Oldman's beard), which is a pity as it is crying out for some moments of levity to counterbalance the grimness. Oldman's character is relentlessly and often unpleasantly intense (surely the director's fault). The directing is sometimes messy (chaotic unfocused foregrounds, etc). On the plus side, if you find yourself unwittingly in the midst of this film, you can take some comfort from Dennis Hopper (playing a rare kindly role) and Frances McDormand, who is good as Oldman's wife.
The director and star may be British, but make no mistake, this is very much a Hollywood picture. There's the usual morality story and the usual pandering to American's obsession with their own (ever-imperfect) legal system in the form of a fight for justice (though thankfully, we don't pay a visit to any real courtrooms along the way).
On the whole, just a bad idea.
