The Insta-Photo-Mater 5000.

Boris Kodjoe (apparently one of the sexiest men on the planet) plays Michael, a man who loses his son to a stray gunshot during a gang shootout. When the men responsible for his son’s death are not convicted of the murder, but of a lesser drug charge, Michael’s life becomes a mess of drinking and depression. His despair drives him to seek vengance against the men who killed his son. He learns how to make a zip gun out of newspaper and formulates a bizarre plan to get into jail and kill the men who killed his son. Genius!

For some unexplainable reason, rather than lodging an appeal or having the case re-opened to have the men convicted of his son’s murder he gets himself thrown in jail by beating a police officer within an inch of his life. Not only does this lead to Michael being imprisoned but it puts an innocent policeman in a wheelchair, setting into motion a chain of events that only the most hardened masochist will want to sit though.

48 hours 24 style.

Why he didn’t just go buy some drugs and drop then in front of the nearest convenient law enforcement official rather than subjecting some poor guy to a savage beating is never really explained. How he also just happens to end up in the same prison as his son’s killers without it being flagged by prison officials is conveniently brushed over also.

Why am I even trying to figure out what this movie was trying to do? It’s hard to tell if this film is a revenge flick, a prison drama, a romance, a buddy movie or even a documentary because it touches on all these genres but none in such a way to make it a defining characteristic. It’s a complete muddle of bad acting, cliché ridden prison scenes and ultimately leaves no satisfactory resolution to the whole sticky mess. I suppose that’s life, perhaps it is a documentary after all.

I smell a fugazi!

Doing Hard Time is presented in a 1.85:1 aspect ration and is enhanced for widescreen displays. The overall video presentation on this disc is atrocious mostly because of the presence of grain varying from acceptable to completely appalling. When the picture isn’t grainy it tends to be way too soft, almost blurry at times. While some of this grain and softness could be due to artistic effect by the director there are scenes that clearly aren’t meant to be affected by these problems so there is no excuse for their existence.

Apart from the quite impressive array of Dolby Digital 5.1 language tracks and equally diverse list of subtitles tracks the audio presentation is nothing special either. The centre channel is an obvious underperformer here as the dialogue is quite often impossible to hear requiring a large boost in volume to discern what is being said even in scenes where the performance doesn’t call for quietly spoken parts.

I once caught a fish THIS BIG!!!

The highlight of an otherwise dull and lifeless audio presentation would be the surround channels that are used to good effect for ambient noises, particularly in some of the prison scenes.

There are absolutely no extras on this disc at all unless you count a static 16:9 menu system as an extra in which case it has one extra.

Somewhere in this movie there is a message or moral but it gets lost in the unfocussed mess of tough prison nicknames, pointless montages and reality defying plot twists.