Behind bars
Despite the cliches, Lockdown is a taut thriller
Spike Lee's mesmerizing 25th Hour centers on one man's horrified contemplation of what awaits him in a New York prison.
Director John Luessenhop's Lockdown is a raw, disturbing visualization of such fears. Homosexual rape, sexual servitude, vicious self-preservation and a life of constant brutality make Lockdown a return to the hard-core realities of prison life stressed in a clink cycle from I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang to Bad Boys.
While Lee's powerful film focuses on dread and regret, Lockdown's vicious ambience is more physical and literal, borrowing a page from the gritty realism of films like Boyz N the Hood.
Produced by the Atlanta-based Rainforest Films company, Lockdown focuses on three men, Avery, Cashmere and Dre who begin the film as friends, but by its second act are bitterly divided in prison's kill-or-be-killed jungle law.
Talented swimmer Avery (Richard T. Jones) has been offered the hope of a better future for his girlfriend and young son when a college recruiter, Charles (Bill Nunn), pegs him for a scholarship. Dre (De'aundre Bonds) is Avery's brother-in-law, a straight-arrow kid pulling working-stiff wages at the dry cleaners. In the Ice Cube role, Cashmere (Gabriel Casseus) is a drug dealer out of a gangsta rap fantasy with a hair-trigger temper, a pretty-boy mean mug and a one-man arsenal of pit bull and Glock at the ready. How this mismatched trio ever became friends in the first place, especially considering the good 10 years actor Richard T. Jones seems to have on the other two, is quickly bypassed for the story's real prison yard meat.
The trio suffers an inevitable downward spiral when they are pulled over on their way to a party and hothead Cashmere shoots one of the cops. The three friends are mistakenly linked to a fast-food joint murder and all three are shuttled off to the Big House. As their bus pulls into the prison, a succession of metal gates opens and then closes with a disturbing finality behind them. Luessenhop introduces his characters to prison life with a convincing queasy lump in their throats, and manages to maintain that air of dread throughout.
Once inside the prison's barbed wire-enforced walls, the trio soon scatters. Cashmere is accepted into a powerful black prison gang, which demands a brutal price for membership. Following the advice of his soon-to-be-released, politically conscious cellmate, Avery attempts to lie low. But it's the boyish Dre who fares the worst in the prison economy, living out every one of 25th Hour's nightmares as the live-in sex slave of his heavily tattooed white cellmate, "Graffiti." The rape scenes in Lockdown are some of the movie's most brutal, in a film more often about the spectacle of extreme violence than about the crushing, gut-twisting malaise it produces.
First-time director Luessenhop has seen his share of Big House tales and often falls back on stereotype and cartoonish characterizations, as in the G.G. Allin tattoo convention appearance of the white inmates. Scenes of Cashmere's ghetto existence on the outside are equally outsized — from his constant chest-beating shouts of "Bitch" to his obedient girlfriend done up in sausage-casing outfits and a hilarious blond bob — which play into a degraded Hollywood-conventional view of black life. Such nihilistic music video cliches work against a certain sugary feel-good vibe in which Avery struggles to stay clean and out of trouble while his devoted girlfriend and Charles try to win his release by finding the real killers in the burger drive-thru murder.
Lockdown is an engrossing, taut thriller about prison that shows a real talent for storytelling and boasts impressive performances. But it could be vastly improved if Luessenhop left the sloppy-seconds conventions behind and focused more on elevating a singular vision above a well-worn, commonly tread path.