Cinema: Ugly Trip

MIDNIGHT EXPRESS Directed by Alan Parker Screenplay by Oliver Stone

The outline of Billy Hayes' true story —he is an American youth who escaped a Turkish jail after he was caught carrying hashish in Istanbul—suggests the possibility of a familiar kind of genre film. Clever and desperate prisoners concocting elaborate escape plans, fooling their dense and brutal warders, finally making it to freedom despite the odds —that sort of nonsense, escapist entertainment in the most literal sense of the term. Indeed, the promotion for this film encourages such expectations.

But what we have here...