Overpraise The Shawshank Redemption, and this is what you deserve. Frank Darabont, the writer and director of both, raises an eyebrow of interest for his apparent dedication to breathing some life into the prison genre (pretty well flatlined since Escape from Alcatraz), but the eyebrow might decline into a scowl over his insistence on breathing some Life Lessons into it. Working again from a Stephen King original, not a short story this time but a six-part serialized novel of "Dickensian" dimensions, he perhaps has a ready-made excuse to run on almost an hour longer than in the inexcusably overlong previous adaptation. But in truth the proportions remain much the same. Each of them seems about twice as long as it needed to be. Plainly, the extravagant, if hardly universal, praises for Shawshank -- to say nothing of the seven Academy Award nominations (no wins) for it -- have not inspired the filmmaker to rein in the pretensions, the sententiousness, the humanistic piety, the spiritual uplift. They would seem to have led him to the assumption that more of the one kind of thing (plus some actual Christlike miracles on the part of a simple-minded, afraid-of-the-dark, three-hundred-pound black inmate) will be sure to produce more of the other kind of thing. As before, Darabont removes himself from serious consideration through his tactless blend of brutality and bathos. He hits you with hard realities (including three grueling electrocutions) only in order that you will feel so much better when he massages them away. His humanism boils down to the big sweaty screen-filling glazed-ham closeup (or rather, to the thousand such closeups); his spiritualism boils down to the pyrotechnical shower of sparks. Tom Hanks, David Morse, Bonnie Hunt, James Cromwell, Michael Clarke Duncan. (1999) — Duncan Shepherd
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