Doing Hard Time

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.

If you like badly acted and badly edited low budget movies then this is your flick (Tarantino - take note). I'd recommend 'Baby Boy' with Snoop if you want a good 'from the hood' type movie. Personally speaking I don't think DHT was worth the discounted rate it took to make.

It's a prison movie mostly, though there are a few 'outside' scenes. It is low budget. The story makes no sense - I couldn't get in to the main characters mindset at all. There are several scenes that dwell for an inappropriate amount of time on male rear ends in the prison showers and other prison places. I don't like looking at man butt, so that bothered me. The acting sucks too, not just a little bit - but a whole bunch. The editing tries to be artsy but just succeeds in being crappy and bad. The one exception is when the gay bookie character is dancing to an old song while mopping up after hours, that was a decent scene for about 15 seconds.

Overall, not worth the time - pretty much garbage.

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 ...

The movie starts really sad and the story tells itself along the way. You expect everything that happens in the movie. A man revenging the death of his 7-year old son, but he has to get himself into prison where the dudes are that caused this trauma. Along the way no spectaculare things happen, because the most parts are already told in 100 other movies. Don't be throwing it directly to the bin, cause the character of Michael is played more then reasonable. No real good conversations, but some nice action scenes. Finishing in a "never-thought-it-could-be-in-this-kind-of-movie" end...but maybe one of the better ends I've seen in this genre.

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....