It has some good dramatic moments, but instead of contributing to the protagonists' journey in a congruous way they're mostly there to pass the time, which for the audience would otherwise be as excruciatingly boring as it is for the inmates of the prison.
The film presents a good way to waste an afternoon, but it doesn't leave you thinking about the world, or yourself, in a different way. Man shouldn't be in prison, is mistreated, gets out of prison... Whoopie-f*cking-hoo.
I don't actually hate the film. I just hate the way that it has made its way to the top of IMDb and some magazines' top 100 lists. It astounds me that anyone can find so little in the rich tapestry of life that they consider The Shawshank Redemption to be cinema at its very finest. Its success must be due to the film's values failing to offend anyone much: it's numero uno one due to a consensus of indifference.
In the film’s defence, Morgan Freeman’s performance is excellent, and the script – despite being pedestrian -- is a million miles from The Green Mile, another Stephen King-penned prison flick, whose characters are even more two-dimensional, whose plot drags on for an eternity without any direction, and which asks the audience to believe in a mouse that lives forever while at the same time denying children the chance to enjoy the spectacle by including Tom Hanks’ diseased genitals as another key plot point.
Regardless of this, it is wrong that Shawshank survives recency bias and 13 years on is second only to The Godfather in IMDb users’ estimation. Murder in the First (1995) tells a very similar story, and does so with more finesse, but relatively few people have ever heard of it… Maybe Shawshank is ‘a classic’ just because enough people have said so in magazines and culture supplements and enough part-time filmgoers failed to disagree.
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