Felon (2008)

Last year I was a guest on Francis Rizzo III's KilmerKast podcast, and we discussed this film. I've been meaning to review it here since then, but something else seemed to always bump it down the list, so once we got through my February and March posts, I made a point of getting this up first thing in April, and here we are. In addition to us, Cool Target Action Reviews has covered this, so you can go there to see what they thought.

Felon has Stephen Dorff as a guy with a wife, a young child, and a contracting business that's doing well. All that changes one night when an intruder breaks into their house, and after he chases the guy outside, he strikes him in the head with a baseball bat, killing him. The cops decide this isn't a simple case of self-defense, so he ends up in the system, where, to save money he takes a plea that only gives him three years in prison. That doesn't work out so well either, because on the way to the prison a guy is shanked, and the weapon is stashed under Dorff's seat. Afraid to rat the killer out, he gets put in the maximum security unit, where the head guard is pitting prisoners against each other in brutal brawls. Will Dorff make it out of the system alive?

Brutal is one way to describe this. Visceral is another, especially with the fights. These aren't nicely choreographed affairs like we saw in Avengement--though those were brutal too--instead we had two people whaling on each other. The realistic view of jail and prison that this movie gives us isn't fun at all, which makes this a bit of a tough watch. The problem for me came in when we had some holes in the plot. That's the thing, I can do not fun if the story's compelling and believable. The first thing is Dorff foregoes an attorney for a public defender to save money. Later we find out that they had money available that they could have used for his defense. Why didn't he do that? Any decent lawyer--which for the money he was talking about having, he could've afforded--could have pled this thing down to probation. Once we find out about this money, it's like, why are we here watching him go through all this? Second, the end of the movie requires a lot of Hail Marys for it to work. When the protagonists need a lot of luck for it to all go right, it's harder to buy in, and again, this movie needed that buy-in. Also, not necessarily a bad thing, but the film touches on some things, like the prison-industrial complex, where the number one money maker in the town is the prison, but it was beyond the scope of their 104-minute runtime to really get into it. Just the same, the stark, realistic view of our jail and prison system was very necessary and very well done, and to me that's really where this movie makes its money.

Val Kilmer was the reason why we were talking about this at all, and I've realized I didn't mention him in the first three paragraphs. He's interesting here as the mercurial prisoner in for life after he avenged his wife and daughter's deaths by killing the men responsible and their families. He ends up in the same cell as Dorff after he starts a riot in his previous prison. He's a bit of the wise lifer who shows Dorff the ropes, but what I liked was the film depicted him having to go through the same humiliating rituals of prison as everyone else. Often these movies have a character like him, and the guards and fellow inmates pay him deference so he doesn't have to deal with things like strip searches or having his hands cuffed behind him before he leaves his cell. I think in that sense, Kilmer leans into this role and fills exactly what the filmmakers were looking for, which I really appreciated. The goatee he sported, maybe notsomuch.

This is our fifth Stephen Dorff film on the DTVC, the last being in 2011 when we posted Shadowboxer. The thing about him here, is he had a bit of the shine of child actor on him, and despite the work he did to immerse himself in this part, I kept seeing the cool 2000s star who always got into trouble. I always that early e-cigs commercial he did, where he's standing on the beach in his James Dean pea coat with collar up, face perfectly stubbled and hair perfectly coiffed, smoking his e-cig in the best movie star leading man style, while we hear his voice-over telling us "hey, we're all adults here." And maybe that's my issue and not Dorff's. The character too had some issues though. One, we have no idea how he knows how to fight, yet he has no problem defending himself in prison. Two, perhaps if we did, we'd also understand why he, after chasing he intruder from his home, followed him out, leading to hitting him in the head with the bat. I get wanting to protect your family, but for most people getting the guy out is enough, so it would've been good to know why Dorff's character took it further than that. Again, we needed these things in place to follow this movie into the darker, bleaker story it wanted to tell.

Dorff's wife was played by Marisol Nichols, who I knew from her role as Audrey in Vegas Vacation. Obviously this film wasn't as fun as that one, though this could have benefited from a Wayne Newton cameo to lighten things up. In one scene, when she comes to visit Dorff in prison, she needs to take off her clothes for a strip search, and according to IMDb it's the only nude scene of her career. Francis and I agreed that it wasn't really necessary (I know, me the guy who grew up on raunchy romp comedies saying a nude scene isn't necessary!), and in fact actually took away from the impact of the scene that they were going for. Had they gone shoulders up--even if she still needed to be nude for the scene for her to get into character--and focused on her face and the indignity of what she was going through, it would've been more powerful and really hit home. Her character was another example too of how the limited scope of the film caused them to touch on things they couldn't really delve into more. You could almost have made a separate film about what it was like for her on the outside dealing with everything that comes with having her husband in prison.

Some of the events in this film were based on the notorious Corcoran State Prison in California, so I decided to look it up, and it turns out this film may have gone easy on the brutality. Yes, the staged fights that the film depicts happened, but in the film, the shooting of the fighters seemed extreme--like the main guard, played by Harold Perrineau, had gone off the rails. Turns out, those shootings of the inmates were more common than that. Also, among the more famous inmates, one was Joe Son, who I had no idea when I reviewed Shootfighter 2 last October was convicted of torture in 2011 (not rape because the statute of limitations had passed on that, which makes no sense that there's a statute of limitations on rape, but that's our justice system for you), and then got more time after he killed his cellmate. Beyond the fact that this prison seems like a cesspool of corruption and maltreatment of the prisoners, in reading the lists of inmates, these seem to be the worst of the worst, which makes it seem even stranger that someone like Dorff's character would've been sent there--by the same token, it adds enough plausible deniability in case anyone asked about whether certain details actually happened the way they told it.

And with that, let's wrap this up. Currently you can stream this on Netflix--but whenever you end up reading this you never know if they'll have dumped it by then. This is not a fun movie by any stretch, but while it has some holes in it, overall it has a solid commentary on the US justice system that may be worth your watch. Also, you can catch KilmerKast on iTunes, or by going to this link here: https://anchor.fm/francis-rizzo-iii1 In addition to talking Kilmer, Francis does a great job with segments like Kilmer in Kontext, where he looks at the movies, music, and TV shows that were popular when the film came out; and then games with his guests, like on this one where I had to guess whether the Kilmer film he mentioned had Kilmer as a cop or a criminal.

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1117385

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, A Girl and a Gun, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!