Kritiken

It’s too bad that they didn’t have a better director who instead could have figured out cinematically how to convey Henri’s agonies during his confinement. Working from a script by Aaron Guzikowski, the director Michael Noer generally puts the camera where it should go and adds a sterile Parisian interlude but nothing much else of note.

Shit-streaked, blood-soaked, and mud-caked, the French penal colony inmates of Papillon make for a compellingly sorry spectacle — men reduced to the status of animals, their bodies and faces turning to dirty, leathery sinew before our eyes.

Michael Noer's remake is more generic and romantic, with a duller sense of character and setting. It's a reasonably diverting genre exercise, but Schaffner's original humbles it by every criterion of excellence.