Pun Salad

Prison escape movies are a small but vital genre. In this one, the escape is the relatively easy part.

The prison here is a good old Stalin-era Gulag work camp, smack dab in the middle of Nowheresibirsk, Siberia. A motley bunch of inmates, facing their imminent demise, band together to break out. They have a vague idea of hiking south to Lake Baikal and escaping to Mongolia. This turns out to be much, much more difficult than expected. At the end, the survivors will have walked 4000 miles to India. (Not a spoiler: it's revealed right at the beginning.)

The difficulties faced by the group, both before and after their escape, are graphically shown. Among the IMDB keywords for the movie: "night blindness", "freezing to death", "sunstroke", "torture", "death by dehydration", "starvation", "sandstorm",… and they're missing some. It's an impressive, epic story.

The recognizable faces here are Ed Harris, playing a mysterious American only known as Mr. Smith, and Colin Farrell as a murderous Russian criminal. It's directed by the relatively famous Peter Weir.

The movie is based on memoir of one of the alleged escapees, Slawomir Rawicz. Its accuracy is questionable, but that doesn't take away much from the movie.