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 (dick!!!!!), Shirt-Bird kills himself and it is the saddest, worst thing ever to happen in any movie. Until the other worst thing that happens later in this movie. Ugh, this movie!

Andy is feeling sassy in the aftermath of Shirt-Bird’s death. So, one day, he barricades the bathroom door while his guard is shooting some brown bullets into the porcelain yard, and commandeers the prison loudspeaker to play a Mozart song. Every single one of the downtrodden, defeated inmates turns his face to the sun, soaking up, with his full body, this fleeting scrap of the achingly brilliant human audacity so long denied him by cold prison walls—as though humans do not need art as surely as we need oxygen, as though we do not bleed beauty as freely as blood.

“I have no idea, to this day, what those two Italian ladies were singing about,” Morgan Freeman intones.

Meatballs, probably.

Andy starts laundering money for the warden’s nefarious extortion schemes, which is a pretty cool prison job. It also brings him ever deeper into the warden’s inner circle, which is not that cool because the warden is a big turd.

Case in point: One day, Billy from Ally McBeal shows up in prison and reveals that—mega small world—he used to be cellmates with the guy who actually murdered Andy’s wife! When Andy takes that hot goss to the warden, hoping to get a new trial, the warden throws him in the hole for two months AND THEN MURDERS BILLY FROM ALLY MCBEAL. (Not sure why Andy expected the murderous warden for whom he’s been laundering millions of dollars to be like, “Yes, I’ll totally help you get out of prison so you can go tell everyone about my mad felonies!” but yeah. You’re totally the smartest guy in prison, Andy.)

At this point, Andy is officially FED UP with this shit. He tells Morgan Freeman that he plans to move to Mexico one of these days, and that if Morgan Freeman ever gets out of prison, he should just go to Buxton and look under the special volcano rock and then he can come live with Andy in his Mexican she-shed. And Morgan Freeman is like, “Oooooooookay. Go lie down, kookaburra.”

Now everyone’s freaked out because Andy’s been “talkin’ funny” and it seems like he’s planning to self-harm out of grief over the death of Billy from Ally McBeal (I know the feeling). AND THEN HE DOES. Only he does it with like a laser or some shit because when the guards open his cell in the morning, dude is STRAIGHT VAPORIZED.

What actually happened is that Andy spent nineteen years tunneling out of the cookie castle with his rock hammer, concealing the tunnel hole behind Raquel Welch’s boobs, and when it was finally done, he yoinked the warden’s outfit and shoes (which seems dubious because the warden appears to be a small little pocket-pal and Tim Robbins is a ten-foot ’squatch, but okay), and crawled through a half mile of poopoo to get out. Then he tattled on the warden to the newspaper and headed to Mexico with $375,000. WHO’S KOOKABURRA NOW, MORGAN?

Cops show up at Shawshank and take Clancy Brown away, and he’s all a-bloo-bloo-bloo-bloo-bloooooo and then the warden shoots himself and then Morgan Freeman is like, “Some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright. And when they fly away, the part of you that knows it was a sin to lock them up does rejoice.” (Hollyweird Fun Fact: that line wasn’t in the script—it’s just something Morgan Freeman said to his assistant when she brought him a salami sandwich in the voice-over booth.)

Then Morgan Freeman has his parole meeting and he NAAAAAILS IT! He gets out of prison and goes to work at the grocery store where Shirt-Bird worked and lives in the same dumb apartment where Shirt-Bird lived and the same shitty white ladies are all, “Um, DOUBLE BAGS,” and his boss is like, “STOP TELLING ME ABOUT YOUR URINE,” and he just doesn’t know how to fit in in this non-prison world. “All I do anymore,” he says, “is think of ways to break my parole so maybe they’d send me back.”

Until, one day, Morgan Freeman remembers that Andy left him a present under some fucking rock in Buxton! And do you know what the present is? IT’S LITERALLY A TON OF BUX!

So Morgan Freeman takes a bus to Mexico and finds Andy on a beach and he’s so excited that he doesn’t even care that his only hat falls in the ocean and the two of them scrub boats together forever. And that’s why Sharktank Rondonald is the first great American bromance. Eleven out of ten. Your mom was right.

RATING: 11/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.