It is a tournament of brutality unrelieved by imagination.

It drags on for two-and-a-half hours... to show us that the talents of even Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen can be buried under endless restatement of the obvious and that the best of adventure stories can be attenuated into boredom.

The narrative is epic and life-spanning...The locations are stunning...and the surreal touches...add to the sense of a highly original art-movie spectacular.

Schaffner seeps the film in the humid, fetid texture of the jungle prison camps, the oppressive silence of solitary, the death watch of the infirmary and the brutality of a prison culture...