DVD Review: FELON

It's with great pleasure this week that I got to speak to actor Stephen Dorff (video interview coming soon!) who is currently in the U.K. promoting his STV prison movie FELON which co-stars Val Kilmer and was harshly pulled from it's theatrical release, instead going STV. There's been hundreds of worse tripe in the cinema's this year, this movie deserved better. The movie is now available to purchase from OWF"s favourite retailer Axel Music and my review is below... FELON is basically THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION meets FIGHT CLUB... Wade Porter (Stephen Dorff) is a family man and successful small businessman who falls foul of legislation that says if there's an intruder in your home, you can defend yourself with anything to hand, but not if the intruder is on their way out and therefore no longer a threat. Porter makes the mistake of chasing a burglar out of his house and hitting the burglar with a baseball bat. The burglar dies and Porter has to plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter, receiving a sentence of three years in prison, but with good behaviour he'll be out in 15 months. Readers in the UK, if you think this could never happen to you, then think again because the law is the same. You can even defend yourself with a shotgun, if you happen to be a farmer. However, before Porter has even made it through the prison gate, he's being asked to conceal a weapon used to settle a score between two members of the Aryan Brotherhood, a real life white prison gang. In an attempt to keep his head down and stay out of trouble, Porter pleads ignorance to the head guard, Lieutenant Jackson (Harold Perrineau, Michael in Lost), who is investigating the murder. So, to teach Porter a lesson, Jackson puts him in the Security Housing Unit (SHU), home to those prisoners who, while not necessarily the most dangerous, refuse to behave themselves. In the SHU, Jackson forces the inmates to fight each other for the amusement of the guards. The only way Porter will make it is if he learns from the experience of his new cell mate, notorious mass murderer and lifer, John Smith (Val Kilmer). FELON is not just another prison movie. It's a serious indictment of the way the prison system in America brutalises people on both sides of the fence and one that is all the more resonant given the current global economic crisis. At the moment there's 2.3 million people incarcerated in America. That's one in 100 adult Americans. With unemployment and therefore crime on the rise, that figure is only going to go up. Director Ric Roman Waugh has researched his pet project thoroughly, from the smallest details of the often humiliating day to day routine of prisoners, to actual abuses in state prisons like Corcoran in California. What's more, each character is convincing psychologically. Dorff plays the "innocent" everyman who thinks he has to align himself with the Aryan Brotherhood in order to survive. Porter begins the film playing a role. Fighting the Aryan Brotherhood's fights for them, he deludes himself into thinking he's not one of them and that he'll be out soon. That he's using them and not the other way around. In fact, his actions lead to years being added to his sentence. At one point Porter's wife leaves him and he thinks he has nothing left to lose, so he starts breaking heads in earnest. That's when Dorff is at his terrifying best. Similarly horrific is Perrineau as Jackson. However, the audience also gets to see Jackson's life outside the prison walls and why he has good reason for wanting to take down criminals one at a time. The implication in both cases is that it's the system, rather than the individual, that's at fault and that the longer you spend within the system, the more corrupt you become. The movie also works as a straight action drama narrative, emotionally satisfying in that with Smith's help, Porter comes up with a plan to expose Jackson and get out of jail, but in a way this undermines Waugh's message. Arguably, it would have been better if Porter was left to rot. Val Kilmer deserves a special mention as the charismatic Smith, a tragic revenger who committed murder with the intention of receiving the death penalty, but who was given life imprisonment instead. Excellent support comes from Marisol Nichols (Nadia in 24) and Sam Shepherd. EXTRA'S Just trailers and a "Making Of" documentary called "The Shark Tank" after the film's name for the yard where the prisoners fight. The highlight is how Waugh shot the fight scenes using ex-gang members as extras, drawing on their experience in real prison fights and Mixed Martial Arts. VERDICT Speaking of criminals, producers know that most of their profit comes from DVD sales and that one of the best ways to combat piracy is skip the theatrical distribution stage altogether. Alternatively, the thinking behind FELON being straight-to-DVD might be that despite the pulling power of its stars, it's a very small movie, shot on location on a small budget, about a subject that has been committed to film time and time again. Perhaps the producers just don't see people paying to see it at the cinema. Whatever the reason, it's a shame because FELON deserves to be viewed by as wide an audience as possible.