Watch NY Prison Break: The Seduction of Joyce Mitchell For Free

A Major Disappointment

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

While it seems this movie stuck very closely to reality, it was shocking how unintentionally funny it was. The humor made it watchable. I'm not sure I would recommend it as a serious learning tool. But it was definitely unforgettable, if for only the wrong reasons. The lead actress came across as the most unbelievable. The supporting cast did a fabulous job with the script they were given.

This movie actually surprised me, after the last few lifetime biopics I saw I didn't have very high hopes for it. But the acting in this was great and they pretty much covered all the events that happened from beginning to end. If you like lifetime movies I would definitely check this out!

On April 23 Lifetime showed a movie they'd been heavily hyping for weeks: "New York Prison Break: The Seduction of Joyce Mitchell," based on a real-life New York prison escape from the Clinton Correctional Facility in June 2015. The escape, in which two convicts with the unfortunate names David Sweat (Joe Anderson) and Richard Matt (Myk Watford) broke out and had help doing so from two prison employees, Joyce Mitchell (Penelope Ann Miller) and Gene Palmer — and were at large for three weeks before Matt was shot down while threatening police with a shotgun and Sweat was taken alive two days later — made national news. Indeed, I can remember thinking when the story broke, "Someday this will be made into a Lifetime movie" — and now here it is. It's also quite well done, written and directed by Stephen Tolkin — who's done reality-based Lifetime movies before, including "The Craigslist Killer" and "Cleveland Abduction," and also has some feature-film credits — and vividly acted by the three principals as well as by Daniel Roebuck as Joyce's husband Lyle, a hapless guy with a penchant for boring her with conversational rambles. He's still turned on by her but she couldn't be less interested in him. Despite its rather clinical title, "New York Prison Break" works on just about every level, from the intrinsic interest of the story to the highly atmospheric direction Tolkin gives it, to the Hitchcockian game he plays throughout where he shows so much detail of how Sweat and Matt are literally digging their way out of the prison we end up rooting for them to succeed even though Tolkin tried to forestall that sort of moral reversal by beginning his film with a graphic depiction of the crime Sweat and Matt committed. Most prison-escape movies hedge their bets by making the prisoners sympathetic and the jailers the bad guys — either they're Nazis running a concentration camp or the authorities on Devil's Island or some such place lording it over unjustly convicted victims — but in this one the bad guys are bad guys, and yet through Tolkin's writing and direction and the appropriately edgy acting of Anderson and Watford they come off as just the sort of irresistible studs that might turn on a woman like Joyce Mitchell full of unfulfilled longings and desires. Penelope Ann Miller's performance as Joyce is also excellent, particularly when she switches from bored housewife and career woman to acting like a giddy teenager in the first throes of romantic passion when she gets notes from Sweat and contemplates a future with him on the outside — a dream of hers he, of course, has no intention of fulfilling! "New York Prison Break" is obviously an exploitation film aimed at taking advantage of the publicity surrounding the real event, and yet it's also a finely honed piece of drama — not a great film by any means, but a solidly appealing one that manages to offer quality entertainment and is particularly good at dramatizing the frustration that leads Joyce Mitchell to her fatal infatuation with Sweat and Matt. Where Tolkin scores best is in the clashes between the three main characters — Mitchell the mature woman (it's established that she's already a grandmother) who's acting like a giddy teenager; Matt the confident seducer who's able to get what he wants with his gifts as an artist (he paints quite a few pictures, including ones of Mitchell and other prison staffers which he trades for favors) and a lover; and Sweat the callous but hunky brute who's willing to exploit not only Joyce but Matt as well.In one of the film's most chilling scene, after the two have broken out together, Sweat dumps Matt and tells him that now that his plans have changed and they're fleeing to Canada instead of Mexico, he won't need Matt because the only reason he included Matt was that Matt spoke Spanish and he doesn't have to have a Spanish-speaker on board if he's going to Canada instead. "New York Prison Break" is the sort of quirky delight that keeps us unlikely Lifetime buffs watching this often exploitative (particularly in their "reality" series, less so in their movies) but also often oddly compelling network.

I've watched some pretty awful movies on Lifetime, and although this was based on a true story, I could not even watch the entire movie. I know Miss Miller studied Joyce in order to portray her to the best of her ability and for accuracy, but Joyce is THE most pathetic woman I've ever seen and her weakness was so annoying that I skipped out on the last 40 minutes. We all know the ending, so no need wasting valuable time on such drivel.