Good on drama, not so good on crime

This is a good picture with good acting from Robert Redford especially, but as a crime picture, this really falls short on basic facts and reality.

First, did they cast this in a drunken stupor in five minutes at a Bar Mitzvah? Aside from Redford and the political client, every criminal in the movie is Jewish. That isn't even how it is in Israel. This isn't a gritty crime syndicate, it is a mensch convention. These are all really, really good actors, but this casting knocks the wind out of the character realism.

Second, the depiction of the "prison" is laughable. There is no role for a prison in this picture anyway, as no one goes to prison without a long court process, but this one isn't even barely a prison. In some scenes, it looks like a state hospital, in others like a commercial bakery or something like that. The locations information for this film says it was a local county jail, which I suppose it might have been, but prisons and county jails can't pass for each other, ever.

Breaking someone out of prison is something so nearly impossible that I am hard pressed to think of anyone who has succeeded at it in the USA (without a lovestruck correctional officer doing it for them, in 1989 a super rich drug kingpin tried to do it with a helicopter landing at a FL federal prison, both he and the pilot were seriously injured and imprisoned), but this doofy movie depicts it as something that can be done with $.99 wire cutters and a shirt! Then, more stupid than that, the convertible Mercedes getaway car is waiting to pick them up outside the secured perimeter, and trained marksmen with semi-automatic rifles tasked with securing that perimeter can't hit a parked car that is four feet outside the perimeter!