Maninder Chana writes a story about a cocky and somewhat unethical ambitious young lawyer that finds himself thrown into a complete Hell when one of his clients unexpectedly kills himself while on a private meeting only days prior to his release from jail.
Stephen T. Kay sits in the Director chair trying to build some tension around the story in a by-the-numbers horror movie.
And when the only thing that comes to your mind when you see the Writer & Director of a movie is "who?" then you know things are not stacking on the right side. Sure, sometimes unknown Writers can create wonderful scripts and unknown Directors can make masterpieces...sadly neither of those is the case with this movie.
The script is a complete mess, and there's a reason for that: this was Chana's first attempt at a "full" story, since his whole career was built over short stories. And you can see that "limitation" permeating into this movie's script.
We have the main character Michael Grey (played by Eric Balfour) as a ruthless young lawyer trying to win cases at all costs whose ambition pushes him to do some really questionable things in order to "secure" a win in Court. And then when everything seems to go "according to plans" suddenly everything goes into "Chaos Mode".
And that's when everything goes awry: almost everything in the story is just completely ridiculous without any sort of verisimilitude whatsoever. Plot elements come and go without any sort of actual explanation. Characters are introduced without any idea of "what to do with them", sometimes even introducing totally pointless characters into an already confusing plot. It seems as if the Writer just doesn't know how to tell a detailed tale and just purposely keeps everything vague as a way of not bothering explaining anything.
In Kay's case, his best work has been the 2000 flick Get Carter, with Sly Stallone. So...yeah, he's no Martin Scorsese.
In the acting department Eric Balfour does a somewhat acceptable job as the lead character, followed by Michael Rooker, in one of his usual roles: a despicable and twisted prison-officer-with-a-moral- standard-of-his-own. Bruce Greenwood does an awful job as South River State Penitentiary's Warden, with a dull and uninspired performance. And Deborah Valente plays Audrey Davis, a Correctional Dept. officer best described as "forgettable".
Bottom line:
-Confusing, convoluted and sloppy script
-Average directing job
-Average-to-Mediocre acting
-Standard photography
-Bad FX
-Not scary
-Not "profound"
-No jump scares
-Awful as a Thriller
-Awful as a Horror movie
-Awful as a Supernatural story
-An all-around weak movie
If you're into masochism there's better things to do to achieve your goal. This movie is 109 minutes of pure boredom from start to finish. Stay far away from it.
Stephen T. Kay sits in the Director chair trying to build some tension around the story in a by-the-numbers horror movie.
And when the only thing that comes to your mind when you see the Writer & Director of a movie is "who?" then you know things are not stacking on the right side. Sure, sometimes unknown Writers can create wonderful scripts and unknown Directors can make masterpieces...sadly neither of those is the case with this movie.
The script is a complete mess, and there's a reason for that: this was Chana's first attempt at a "full" story, since his whole career was built over short stories. And you can see that "limitation" permeating into this movie's script.
We have the main character Michael Grey (played by Eric Balfour) as a ruthless young lawyer trying to win cases at all costs whose ambition pushes him to do some really questionable things in order to "secure" a win in Court. And then when everything seems to go "according to plans" suddenly everything goes into "Chaos Mode".
And that's when everything goes awry: almost everything in the story is just completely ridiculous without any sort of verisimilitude whatsoever. Plot elements come and go without any sort of actual explanation. Characters are introduced without any idea of "what to do with them", sometimes even introducing totally pointless characters into an already confusing plot. It seems as if the Writer just doesn't know how to tell a detailed tale and just purposely keeps everything vague as a way of not bothering explaining anything.
In Kay's case, his best work has been the 2000 flick Get Carter, with Sly Stallone. So...yeah, he's no Martin Scorsese.
In the acting department Eric Balfour does a somewhat acceptable job as the lead character, followed by Michael Rooker, in one of his usual roles: a despicable and twisted prison-officer-with-a-moral- standard-of-his-own. Bruce Greenwood does an awful job as South River State Penitentiary's Warden, with a dull and uninspired performance. And Deborah Valente plays Audrey Davis, a Correctional Dept. officer best described as "forgettable".
Bottom line:
-Confusing, convoluted and sloppy script
-Average directing job
-Average-to-Mediocre acting
-Standard photography
-Bad FX
-Not scary
-Not "profound"
-No jump scares
-Awful as a Thriller
-Awful as a Horror movie
-Awful as a Supernatural story
-An all-around weak movie
If you're into masochism there's better things to do to achieve your goal. This movie is 109 minutes of pure boredom from start to finish. Stay far away from it.