The Top 5 Lockup Legends of All Movie Time

All of these people are tougher than me.

Submitted by mike, 11/05/09 4:31 PM

In honour of Bronson, Nicolas Winding Refn’s stylish, arty and nasty as all hell portrait of “Britain’s most violent prisoner”, we’re going to count down the top 5 all-time big-house bad-asses lockdown-lunatics and uh hoosegow heroes of all movie time. Here we go: 

#5: Clint Eastwood as Frank Morris in Don Siegel’s Escape From Alcatraz. Clint battles Patrick McGoohan’s mean-ass warden and becomes one of the only dudes to ever bust out the rock. Don Siegel (Hell Is for Heroes, The Killers, Dirty Harry) would only direct two films after this, and neither featured anything as cool as Eastwood punching a fat man in the belly and making him eat soap.

#4: Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in Alien 3. Dark, weird and set on a prison planet full of mean weirdos, Ripley battles a really well-done dog version of H.R. Giger’s original sans Newt, Hicks and Bishop, and makes a lot of fans really cranky. The debut feature of a 27-year old David Fincher (Se7en, Panic Room).

#3: Snake Plissken. Forget the sequel and watch Kurt Russel as the one-eyed dude bad enough to save the president from the maximum-security island Manhattan has become. Another John Carpenter classic. Plissken flies a glider around and has amazing hair and the film also has Lee Van Cleef in it so it technically has to be good.

#2: Tim Robbins’ Andy Dufresne runs the long-con on nasty guards, nasty warden and nasty inmates in Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption. Absolutely overlooked at the time of its release, this ultimate good-guy-somehow-overcoming-without-violence story has become (rightfully) a classic.

#1: Paul Newman as Luke in Cool Hand Luke ate 50 eggs and was handsome as shit, and went down a legend. God damn.