Keanu: Okay, ma’am.3
Then all the Hollywood tourists high-five and take pictures because they love two hot, dirty people kissing in a burning subway car that just exploded out of the earth like a Tremors worm.
This is the greatest love story ever told. RIP, Helen.
RATING: 9/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
Footnotes
1 USE THIS LINE IN THE REBOOT!!!!!!!!
2 MOTHERFUCKING APRIL 2020!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WOW, A TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
3 It has come to my attention that in Speed 2: Cruise Control Sandra Bullock is in a “relationship” on a “boat” with Jason Patric, but experts agree that SPEED 2 IS NOT CANON. THE COMMITTEE DOES NOT RECOGNIZE THE VALIDITY OF SPEED 2 OR BOATS.
The Shawnsnake Redumptruck
The Shawshank Redemption is a movie about how prison used to be pretty bad (like, at least 4–5 percent more bad than it is now, I think!). Tim Robbins is Andy Dufresne, a fancy banker who is falsely convicted of his wife’s murder in a kind of Night-the-Lights-Went-Out-in-Georgia-style whoopsie-daisy, and gets two consecutive life sentences. (So that’s how you put a banker in prison! #topical)
Over at Shumptruck State Priz, Morgan Freeman is not getting paroled, AS USUAL. He explains, folksily, that he’s the guy who smuggles in contraband such as cigarettes, pornos, and geological fieldwork equipment. “Yessir, I’m a regular Sears and Roebuck.” (Pretty sure the cigarettes/porno/rock hammer Sears is a specialty branch.) He is also the narrator of the prison.
When Andy shows up, prison’s like, “Hey, welcome to prison. We hired Clancy Brown to be mean to you.” Not a terrible crime reduction tactic, TBH!
While the guards hose and flour all the new inmates, Morgan Freeman and his prison friends—Richie Aprile, the Grim Reaper from Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, an old guy with a bird in his shirt, and three to four Tom Waits cosplayers—place bets on which one of the new guys is going to cry first. Turns out, it’s the fat one, OF COURSE (can fat people be afforded no dignity?), who starts screaming for his mommy as soon as they turn the lights off. Everyone has an early morning of pointless toil, gallows humor, and grimacing, so Clancy Brown murders the crying fat man with his Clancy Brown Murder Stick.
At breakfast the next day, Andy finds a maggot in his porridge, so he gives it to the dude with the shirt-bird who’s like, “Jake says thank you!” NO, HE DIDN’T. I WATCHED THE WHOLE THING. HE SAID, “CHEEP CHEEP.” #GASLIGHTING
During his post-breakfast shower, Andy is approached by a red-haired fellow who is one of the FBI agents who is mean to Chris Tucker in Rush Hour and also indicates that he would like to initiate a sexual relationship: “Hey, anybody come at you yet? Anybody get to you yet? Hey, we all need friends in here. I could be a friend to you. Hey. Hard to get. I like that.” (Yo, guy, read The Rules. Neediness is a turnoff.) Morgan Freeman advises Andy to “grow eyes in the back of [his] head,” which I’m pretty sure is impossible, but apparently some people in prison can speak bird, so what do I know. Andy fails to grow the extra eyes in time and is horrifically beaten and raped. It is the worst.
Andy asks Morgan Freeman to get him a rock hammer, and Morgan Freeman is like, “What is that, weirdo?” and Andy’s like, “My hobby is hitting rocks with a hammer?—just get me one,” and when it arrives, Morgan Freeman is all, “LOLOLOL, THIS IS A VERY TINY HAMMER,” and Andy is all, “You do you, me do me!!!” The downplaying of the hammer’s power becomes very important for a later switcheroo. Note it.
One day, all the guys are tarring the roof of the license plate factory when Clancy Brown starts going on and on about how he’s inheriting $35,000 from his dead brother, but he doesn’t want to pay a bunch of stupid dead-brother taxes. “Uncle Sam,” he gripes, “he puts his hand in your shirt and squeezes your tit till it’s purple.” (Sir, real quick, do you mean Uncle Sam the fictional patriotic dandy? Or do you have an actual abusive uncle named Sam? Oh my god, is that how your brother died?) Andy tells Clancy Brown that he’s a banker and offers to fix his tax problems if Clancy Brown will give everyone beer. And here’s why Andy is so cool: he DOESN’T EVEN WANT THE BEER. (Andy, please, have a beer. You’re in prison.)
After that, Andy and Morgan Freeman decide that they are best friends.
Back in his cell one night, Andy is playing around with his rock hammer when a huge chunk of wall just glops off into his hand. Hey, prison, what the fuck is your wall made of? Ehhhhh, cookie dough. Pretty sure your main job is walls. You did it bad.
Now that Andy is frenemies with Clancy Brown, he finally has some protection from the rape gang. Goodbye, super unpleasant subplot!
Everything is really coming up Andy during this period. He is no longer being violently assaulted on the reg, he gets a job working in the library with Shirt-Bird, he starts doing all the guards’ taxes and memorizing their secrets, and the warden doesn’t mind if he does his stupid rock carving as long as he keeps pretending to care about Jesus. He is truly the best at being a prisoner ever.
UNTIL. Shirt-Bird gets paroled, even though he is two hundred years old and hasn’t been outside prison since a car was called an “electric horse.” He goes to live at a halfway house and gets a job bagging groceries, and he is very lonely and it is very terrible. Plus, for some reason, he decides he HAS TO HARRY AND THE HENDERSONS HIS BIRD. (Dude, I don’t know how it was in the 1870s, but they have birds outside prison now! I’m sure there are mad grubs in the halfway house gruel.) So then, since they won’t let him go back to prison and bird never even calls anymore
