Get your most trusted cellmates together and sharpen those spoons: Apple TV+’s new series Shantaram has us planning an epic jailbreak. Eliza Janssen chooses five of the most exhilarating big screen escapes.
Shantaram: Season 1
The action in Apple TV+’s Shantaram begins with an unlikely prison break: hero Lin Ford (Charlie Hunnam) busts out of an Australian prison in broad daylight, and evades capture in the slums of Bombay for years onward.
It’s no wonder the source material novel is a cult hit, and that Apple have invested so much in the series’ sweeping, globe-trotting narrative. Stories of escape just ignite something in us viewers, a hard-earned and often highly stressful catharsis that overlooks questions of crime and legality in its celebration of man’s innate right to liberation.
This list of the five greatest prison escape films covers cunning teams of prisoners, bumbling claymation POWs, and even some grim movies in which the inmates break out of one kind of detention and into another. I didn’t make room for either of the Nic Cage movies released in 1997 that respectively see him survive a prison plane takeover (Con Air), or dupe his way in and out of a bizarre magnetic oil-rig supermax (Face/Off). Sorry.
Brute Force (1947)
“Nobody ever escapes”, says the alcoholic prison doc in Jules Dassin’s muscular black-and-white drama, and he’s completely right. Not the snivelling prison yard snitches and toadies, heroic riot-starter Burt Lancaster, or even the sadistic guards and wardens faking inmate suicides to maintain a state of paralysed submission. This is the platonic ideal of a prison escape story, with film noir flashbacks revealing the reason behind each man’s incarceration (a femme fatale is always to blame) as they orchestrate an explosively tense breakout.
See also: Rififi, Dassin’s similarly nail-biting cat-burglar classic with another cast of gruff macho criminals. Or Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17, a POW black comedy with a lot of Brute Force’s same locked-up paranoia and infighting.
Escape From Alcatraz (1979)
The last collaboration between steely film dudes Clint Eastwood and director Don Siegel, this aspirational thriller lays out how a real 1962 escape from San Francisco’s famously inhospitable island jail went down. Where Brute Force goes out with a violent bang, Escape From Alcatraz’s arts-and-crafty getaway ends on a hopeful note, with Eastwood and his buddies seemingly emerging victorious over the institution that would close one year after the escape. Whether they made it out alive or not is unclear, but also somewhat irrelevant—it’s the principal of freedom that counts.
See also: Birdman of Alcatraz, with Burt Lancaster back again but as a far more docile, bird-loving inmate who barely thinks of escape. Michael Bay’s ludicrous Alcatraz-set The Rock is a total blast, shot on location with production forced to accomodate the tourists milling around.
Chicken Run (2000)
Yes, it’s kind of silly to choose this Aardman stop motion film over its obvious inspiration—the all-timer POW drama The Great Escape—but motorcycle jumps be damned, it’s thrilling to watch such an adult and high-stakes story with the whole family. A cast of squishy, bumbling, British-voiced chickens must fly the coop before their sinister farmer turns them all into pies (“I don’t want to be a pie: I don’t like gravy!”). It’s subversively political, feminist, and altogether absolved for casting Mel Gibson as the strutting rooster who promises the ladies freedom.
See also: Paddington 2 and Toy Story 3 have their own scenes of kid-friendly prison-breaks, with adorable CGI protagonists throwing the brutal dehumanisation of the prison industrial complex into sharper contrast. D’awww…
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Frank Darabont’s first feature-length adaptation of a Stephen King story is still, wrongfully, the top film of all time on IMDB’s top 250 list. You can totally see why dads have cried at it for decades, though: it galvanises everything we hope to see in a prison story, from the redemptive cell block friendships and the triumph of hope over tyranny to that timelessly cathartic ending. Morgan Freeman probably puts in one of the most likeable inmate performances ever, making the sentimental hours slide by smoothly with his rich narration.
See also: The Green Mile, Darabont’s other prison-set King collaboration. It’s almost forty minutes longer than the already-prolonged Shawshank and far more treacly.
Brawl in Cell Block 99 (2017)
Imaginatively grim, S. Craig Zahler’s brutal grindhouse effort casts Vince Vaughn against type as a drug dealer sent to medium-security prison. He’ll be out in five years…unless he agrees to work with the madmen threatening his wife and newborn baby, getting himself sent to increasingly stricter and more dangerous wards to pull off a mob hit. As the final, grisly practical effects shot of the film proves, sometimes we can only hope for the one ultimate escape—to be blissfully pardoned from this yucky earthly realm.
See also: Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky. If Brawl wasn’t gory enough for you, then please, just watch Riki-Oh, immediately. Also Tom Hardy in Bronson as “Britain’s most dangerous prisoner”. He pulls off the opposite of an escape, getting confined to smaller and smaller cells for some very bad behaviour until he’s practically being put in his coffin alive.
