That's Virgil Cane man, Lone Ranger ain't got nothing on him. James Rainwood (Tom Selleck) is a real stand up guy, with a loving wife and in a dream job with a company that just couldn't cope without him. His life is just dandy, That is until two corrupt cops make a mistake and burst into his home believing it to be host to a drug deal. Thinking his hairdryer is a gun, one of the cops shoots Rainwood and it's then that the cops realise they have made a monumental error. So planting drugs around the home they set Rainwood up as a dealer who shot at the cops. Believing justice & honesty will see him OK, Rainwood refuses to cop a plea, and is promptly sentenced to a hell hole prison for six years. Here the affable Rainwood needs to wise up quickly or face a brutal and torrid time in the big house. Earlier in 1989 we had seen the release of Sly Stallone vehicle Lock Up, a film, that for all its many faults, was a dream come true to the action movie fan who also has a bent for any piece involving incarceration. So up steps Tom Selleck, who after recently showing himself to be a more than effective light entertainer in films such as Three Men and a Baby and Her Alibi, is looking to break out into other, more rounded genres (he also made the quite excellent Quigley Down Under in 1989). For the most part it's a good fit for Selleck and the casting director. The role of Jimmie Rainw…

"An Innocent Man" draws on every person's secret fear: what would you do if there was a gross miscarriage of justice and you suddenly find yourself being imprisoned? This film does a competent and realistic job of essaying an innocent man's life behind bars and you could say it makes use of the expected cliche of Jimmie Rainwood's greatest challenge being his day-to-day struggle to survive at the remorseless hands of the other more habitual inmates, except this isn't a cliche at all. It is a chilling fact of prison life all over the world. This is a very interesting film which raises a number of harrowing dilemmas in the story and resolves them in a well engineered, realistic and, for the most part, extremely satisfying way.

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