User reviews

An innocent man gets locked up by crooked cops while his wife tries to get him out. The movie plays out exactly how you expect it for most of it. With the same usual in the prison. But once the next part starts so does a different movie with nothing tying you down to the start. No lessons learned from all of it.

To be honest the problem is that Shawshank did everything so much better. I wanna go watch that again of the true development from nothing to something. Also Tom Selleck doesn't emit much emotion through that moustache of his. If he can still keep that in order was he even tried?

Ordinary Joe (Tom Selleck) is in the right house at the wrong time when two scummy cops invade his residence to arrest him for drugs; of course the guy is clean, the cops made a mistake, so they rectify their gaffe by planting the goods on him. Next stop: the courtroom (where an ages-old marijuana infraction rears its ugly head!), and eventually the Big House. Once Selleck is behind bars, plotting to clear his good name, the picture falls into that timeworn vat of melodramatic clichés in the clink. It's a trap for the lead character as well as the audience. Peter Yates directed, hoping to spare us none of the horrors and humiliations of life in the jug. The movie is played for the sensational, and yet some viewers actually bought into it (the picture grossed just over $20M at the domestic box office). Perhaps they're too young to know it has all been done before. *1/2 from ****