This bears about as much connection to Chinese Midnight Express (1997) as that movie bears to the original Midnight Express (1978). Like CME I, however, it is supposed to be set in the 1960s. Not that there is anything really of the sixties about it (other than one prisoner with a short-lived Beatle haircut), but it does allow the filmmakers to pretend that this depicts the treatment of prisoners in the bad old days, rather than risk incurring the Government’s wrath by suggesting that any nastiness could still occur in the more enlightened nineties. (more…)
Posted on June 16th, 2011 at 10:27 pm. Updated on March 9th, 2016 at 3:07 pm.
When a movie about a brutal juvenile detention camp is made by Walt Disney Pictures, you know two things: it’s not going to be too brutal, and it’s probably going to end happily. (more…)
Posted on June 12th, 2011 at 8:30 pm. Updated on June 12th, 2011 at 8:30 pm.
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state…
So starts Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29. But the outcasts in this gritty prison drama spend little time beweeping and much time bringing further disgrace upon themselves. (more…)
Posted on May 7th, 2011 at 10:56 pm. Updated on May 7th, 2011 at 10:56 pm.
This is quite a fascinating film, as much for the caution with which it treats (or rather side-steps) the churning political turmoil which serves as a constant backdrop to the action, as the main story of a prison escapee being pulled in several different directions. (more…)
Posted on May 1st, 2011 at 12:09 am. Updated on December 17th, 2013 at 9:41 pm.
Whoever decided to give this film the English-audience title of Chinese Midnight Express would seem not to have seen the original Midnight Express (1978). For starters, this flick features a Chinese national – bunged up not in some awful foreign jail, but in a Chinese prison. What’s more, he’s an innocent Chinese national in a Chinese prison, and an innocent Chinese national who doesn’t catch the Midnight Express (that is, escape). In fact, no-one escapes, or even tries. It’s a bit bewildering. (more…)
Posted on April 22nd, 2011 at 4:02 pm. Updated on April 22nd, 2011 at 4:18 pm.
It’s my fault, I know, for watching Undisputed II: Last Man Standing (2005) and Undisputed III: Redemption (2010) before this one. This is the best of the three, marginally, but it’s still hard to see how it could spawn two sequels, and such disconnected sequels at that. It’s a bit like watching Midnight Express (1978), knowing already that the reviled Turkish prison officers redeem themselves in Midnight Express II, running rehabilitation programs for foreign prisoners. In Sweden. (more…)
Posted on April 14th, 2011 at 10:58 pm. Updated on April 14th, 2011 at 10:58 pm.
This is a simple murder mystery based in a prison, suspended in dense allusions to the past and the future, and lapsing in and out of an avant garde stage play. ‘Homoerotic’ is the word most commonly used to describe it, and the Japanese title apparently translates literally into ‘4.6 Billion Years of Love’, creating anticipation of a monumental love story, or preparing one for a passion which is a mere speck in the universe. As it turns out, it is love which ends not with a Big Bang but a whimper. (more…)
Posted on April 5th, 2011 at 10:30 pm. Updated on April 9th, 2011 at 5:59 pm.
Burke Wyatt (Johnny Messner) used to be a cop before he got a little rough with a child abuser. Now driving trucks and no longer living with his wife, he is recruited by his ex-partner, now with the FBI, to go undercover at California’s Cainesville State Prison, where there have been a lot of unexplained deaths. In prison he is soon drafted into no-holds-barred fights (shown live on the internet) where the prisoners are sometimes so badly beaten they die. He gets badly hurt himself. That could explain the deaths, then. “Got some leads,” he says in a smuggled message back to the FBI. “Need more time.” No doubt he was a good cop, just not the sharpest. (more…)
Posted on March 28th, 2011 at 8:41 pm. Updated on March 28th, 2011 at 8:41 pm.
Three men walk into a bar – an Englishman, a Jew and an Irishman. No, sorry, wait… Eight men are held in a New York police cell for various infractions of the law – an Englishman and his recording industry colleague – an American of Asian heritage, an orthodox Jew, a heavily-tattooed Irish-American, an African American, his Hispanic mate and the Arab who refused to give them a ride in his taxi, and a minor Italian-American hoodlum. They join a ranting, smelly, soiled old man (John Ford Noonan) who claims to be God… and just might be. (more…)
Posted on March 22nd, 2011 at 9:56 pm. Updated on April 5th, 2011 at 8:30 pm.
It’s not easy to take this drama seriously, whether it’s watching hardened convicts bait a first-timer for being a ‘husband killer’ (parricide is apparently abhorred by the female prisoner population), or the warden allowing his inmates to press against the (cyclone wire) perimeter fence so that they can hear a press conference held in the prison car park and called to broadcast the shortcomings of his management to a national audience. (more…)
Posted on March 13th, 2011 at 9:41 pm. Updated on March 13th, 2011 at 9:41 pm.