Doing Hard Time

I was amazed at how great this movie was. Recently I've been renting a lot of these types of movies (typicaly "black violence") due to the fact that i enjoy violence in movies. But this one surprised me quite a bit.. The storyline seemed a bit silly at first.. Son gets shot in a crossfire of a sour drug deal and the father gets himself arrested so he can get revenge on the guys who killed him.. While it sounded to me like the father was going to be the main character, it turns out to focus more on one of the 2 people who were arrested for the murder/drug deal.

That turned out to be a very good thing. the father (played by Boris Kodje, who's apparently famous... i never heard of him) was a single minded robot bent on revenge. I didn't care too much about his character. However, the convict has to deal with life in prison and learn the rules of the big house if he wants to get out alive.

There is quite a bit of violence in this movie, but its nothing you haven't seen on Oz, or just about any other R rated movie. There is nudity in here, but its just the backside of the guys in prison, nothing sexual or anything.

I strongly recommend this movie to those that like these types. very well done and the ending is certainly not what i had expected.

Good cast, but a bad movie! This is hard to get through, the script is terrible! And the editing could have been much better; why is it so grainy?! RIP Michael K. Williams....

The film was growing but I assume on purpose. Acting poor and script worse. I must questions the review's on this site. Whilst I know we all have differing opinions how any one can score this a 10 I'll never know. This film wasted the acting talents it had.

I just saw this movie and was bored beyond believe.

The story is without any depth. A boy gets accidentally shot, even the involved drug dealers do not know how that happened. They get some years in prison for the drugs.

The father of the dead boy is left behind, his wife has died too some time ago. All he got is his revenge. So he beats up a cop to get into jail to say hello to the two "muderers" of his son.

The movie did not show the motivation of the characters. You see the father drinking alcohol, but you do not feel his pain. The idea of following the guys into jail is so absurd, that it leads to my low rating. To build a complicated weapon like a pistol out of paper instead of a simple one like a knife out of a piece of metal doesn't make any more sense to me.

The situation in the jail is shown as it is like a normal average us-American jail, but I can only hope that it isn't.

In the end I was left with the question what this was all about. I don't know.

No pun intended of course. I was quite surprised ... I remembered the cover for this from back in the day when there were video stores (look it up) ... but what a cast this has. I reckon if you have to look up video store, you probably have no idea who I am talking about. Still if you see the actors in this, you may feel their screen presence.

It's a shame then ... a shame because the story tries to be so many things. Tries to paint the people inside it as more than one shade of ... whatever color you want to see them in. It almost works too - because of the actors we have in this. But it really feels weird at best in its worst moments. Not sure if I would lay the blame entirely on the main actor - it seems the others do a better job than him ... whatever the case, quite the curiosity and quite the odd movie with cliches and things I did not think would happen ... quite the raw potential one can find here ...