Escapist Entertainment

Watching the last half hour of Shawshank Redemption (I rarely watch the stuff before), flaws in Andy Dufresne's escape plan become more apparent. (I've already written on Red's weakness at estimating distances.)

I realize it's a movie, and you simplify these things. For instance, it's probably very hard to knock out a guard and put on his uniform, but we accept this. For that matter, you can't have a guy spend half an hour looking for a parking spot before he robs a bank. Still, Andy's plan was not a cliche, it was the point of the movie.

First, I'll give them years and years of Andy digging just a bit every night. Never getting caught, even though in the final years he's got to go way in there and return without being detected once. And he's got to have a poster up for just as long without anyone ever discovering the massive hole behind it.

Finally, we come to the day Andy plans to escape. He's got to leave that night--he's left evidence behind and if he fails he might not get a second chance. So he crawls and crawls and gets to the end of the hole--only to find a large plumbing system. I have to assume the only way out is through the pipe, because there's no reason Andy would crawl through that nearly half mile of crap unless he had to. So his plan is to hit the pipe with a rock till he breaks through. He can't have practiced this, he has to guess it works. What if it doesn't? In my experiences pipes are usually harder than rocks.

Then he's got a convenient thunderstorm to cover up the rock clanking against the pipe. Seriously, even if he chose a day to escape when he heard there'd be a storm, he simply can't count on this happening. So what if there's no storm? Mightn't the loud sounds of his breaking the pipe be heard, and have guards searching for a guy they quickly discover is missing? (The storm does double duty--it cleans him off once he's out of the pipe. He might smell pretty bad otherwise.)

And finally, in the morning, he goes to a bunch of banks to withdraw money. This is maybe the most dangerous part of the plan. I'm assuming the banks aren't too far from the prison (he probably walks to them). And they probably don't open till 9. Remember now, he's not going to just one bank, he's going to a bunch. And each transaction requires he talk to a top employee, identify himself, and have them prepare the money for him. I'd guess it's gonna take a half hour per bank, but even if he does it in ten minutes, considering travel time, I can't imagine he's on the road out of town until at least noon. Now I don't know when Warden Norton discovers he's gone and finds the hole, but Andy has to know they'll find he's missing as early as they wake up the prisoners and count them--before 9?--and it won't take too long after that for them to realize how he escaped. Even if they don't find his hole, you'd have to figure they'd put out an APB fairly quickly. So now you've got Andy spending hours, openly and notoriously going from bank to bank, while all cops for miles around have been alerted. I don't deny a well-dressed man taking out tons of money in a bunch of banks may not be what they're looking for (though if the Warden were smart, he might have figured this out), but there's a lot of security around these places, and you'd figure they might be on the lookout at nearby areas once there's a spectacular jailbreak. A face the banks have never seen before (and the man who, like the escapee, is very tall) might draw attention.

So good work, Andy, you beat the odds.

PS Shawshank is now ranked the top film of all time at IMDB. This is absurd. It used to be second, and that was bad enough. In truth, it would be absurd for it to show up in a top 100 of all time list.