Doing Hard Time

Rating:
Summary: An "OZ" rehash movie - but a very good one!
Review: One of the recurring motion picture subjects that resurfaces yearly (at least) is the inside prison movie. The public's curiosity about what happens behind locked bars is endless. The long running HBO series OZ added to the numbers of that audience and that seems to be what spawned DOING HARD TIME.

Director Preston A. Whitmore II understands this genre of films and has taken a rather simple story and told it well. Strapping young Boris Kodjoe is devastated when his young son is accidentally killed during a drug deal between two thugs who are arrested and jailed for drug crimes but not for the killing of Kodjoe's son. Revenge blooms during Kodjoe's growing escape through alcohol and on one drunken night he assaults a police officer and gains his goal of arrest and jail time in the same prison where the perpetrators are doing hard time.

How this revenge ultimately plays out is the gist of the film. In the prison we meet all the usual prisoner types and they are actually well crafted and acted by a crew that includes Michael K. Williams, Sticky Fingaz, William L. Johnson, etc and the other side of the bars by Steven Bauer, Giancarlo Esposito and Jazmin Lewis. Not a great or an important film, but a tightly directed and convincingly portrayed prison flick. Grady Harp, December 2004

Rating:
Summary: Prison realities..........
Review: This movie is about a street drug deal that goes wrong. An innocent youth is killed in the process and there is a father who is in great pains over his loss.

The two men end up incarcerated and a third man follows. This third man is in it for revenge over his son's death. The movie is set in a prison. It is about power struggles, gangs, and how inmate life is brought to life.

I found the movie interesting. It brought out a new portrayal of how a father, who has absolutely nothing to do with violence, is caught up his neighborhood's spiritual decay of drugs, violence, insecurity, and how the innocent are disregarded. How this father is deeply involved in his son's upbringing; how the spiritual separation is difficult to deal with.

Rating:
Summary: Ugh
Review: This movie was extremely stupid with bad actors, terrible scenes, and way too many stereotypes. Boris Kodjoe was the reason I even RENTED this movie, and I was taken back by his bad acting. He was pretty okay on Soul Food and is hysterical on Second Time Around, but I think the bad acting around him made his acting bad too. The guy with the braids was too proper for his role (at least on film) and the other guy had a disturbingly hairy booty. Ugh. He was okay as an actor though. The woman security guard was alright, but I wasn't really convinced. The only person who really did a good job in this movie to me was the woman from Parenthood. She played her part well, but then again, she's a pretty good actress. The male security guard who got paid was cool too. BAsically the movie is about a guy trying to get revenge on one of the criminals who may have killed his son in a gun fight. He purposely gets himself into jail and in between the rivalry of the two men who had the gun fight, a leader [...], and another war between a gay inmate and the [...]leader. How Boris conveniently knew which jail he'd be sent to and how the prisoner knew who he was and was so nonchalant about it made this movie not only unrealistic but terribly portrayed.