The System truly has failed if this loafer budget movie is the best that the great Terrence Howard can aspire to. Why ‘loafer budget’? Because it’s so cheap it can’t afford to be shoestring. The problem, though, is not so much lack of funds as lack of ideas. This film is not just cheapo; it’s dumbo. To put it in perspective, not just Howard but even Tyrese Gibson could and should be doing better than this.
The action takes place in “this prison on the outskirts of downtown.” The outskirts of downtown is of course a contradiction in terms; on the other hand, it perfectly summarizes the implausibility of this penitentiary — “one of those corporate-backed private prisons that are propped up by closeted Republicans … But that’s not the point. There’s this Warden there and he thinks he’s God.” Are there Forced Prize Fights? Does the hero go in undercover to expose the racket? Is the sky blue?
What we have here is simultaneously every movie prison ever and nothing like any actual prison ever. The filmmakers have re-multi-purposed a non-descript building — perhaps some sort of teaching establishment that has been wrapped in razorwire? Otherwise I’m at a loss to explain the presence of random whiteboards in both the prison ‘chow hall’ and the protagonist’s daughter’s ‘hospital room’ (the latter we see in a flashback, so maybe the building is a hospital-turned-jailhouse?).
Sargent Terry Savage (Gibson), a former Marine and “goddamn real life war hero,” is convicted for armed robbery (but he was stealing from drug dealers, so it’s all good, right? Memo to directors and screenwriters everywhere: two wrongs don’t make a right). Police Commissioner Harvey Clarke (Ric Reitz) offers him a deal: “go inside. Put your eyes on the place, find me some evidence of human rights violations, corruption. Anything you can get your hands on that I can use to put that motherfucker down,” in exchange for Terry’s freedom. Seems to me that’s the kind of deal you make with the DA, but whatever.
The Commish lets Terry know that “When you get inside, there’s gonna be something waiting for you from me in your cell. That will be the only way that you can report directly to me from that shitshow.” Sure enough, Terry finds a smartphone ‘hidden’ inside a book. The book, mind you, isn’t even hollowed-out. The cellphone is just stuck in there like the world’s thickest bookmark. Moreover, it would appear Harvey neglected to have a charger smuggled in with the phone. This cellphone, as it turns out, is a tumor that quickly spreads to the rest of the movie. It’s not a plothole; it’s a fucking black hole. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves; for now let’s just say — and this is bad enough in and of itself — that it provides yet another example of the laziest, careless form of exposition currently available to hack scriptwriters: the dreaded Pop-Up Texting.
Since this is the first time Terry has ever laind hands on this device, I would have to assume that the Commissioner chopped off the tip of one of Terry’s fingers in order to input the fingerprint in the first place. But anyway, Terry is soon confronted by a pudgy, runty member of the “Aryan Brotherhood” who looks like he’d be more at home with the “Mexican Mob;” it doesn’t help either that his swastika neck ‘tattoo’ seems to have been drawn on with a sharpie.
Terry fights off the Aryans, the Warden (Jeremy Piven because why the hell not?) is impressed yada yada yada Terry is all set to make his debut in “The Dungeon” with Bones (Howard) as his Zen Master.
The Dungeon is the Warden’s personal Fight Club, albeit with only one rule: “there are no motherfucking rules!”. That’s right; once the bell rings, anything goes — that is, of course, until it rings again. Yes, there are rounds in the Dungeon; in between rounds, the fighters are required to break it up and return to their respective, figurative corners. That’s a motherfucking rule right there. Even worse, nobody ever breaks it. Furthermore, the combatants are given to wear an all-black attire with matching protective gear (including a Kevlar vest, of all things). So there are almost no rules, but God forbid someone skins their fucking knees.
After his match with the Warden’s “top dog” Freeway — in describing him, Howard is compelled to say such inane dialogue as “His style is a combination of almost every style. But his nature is formless, so he calls himself Freeway.” Like I said, Howard is great, and he’s no stranger to playing loopy (ex)cons; his Bama (who was in fact from North Carolina and not Alabama, but didn’t want folks calling him Lina) was easily the best part of the ghastly Get Rich or Die Tryin’; In The System, he should be a big fish in a small pond, but he mostly just flops about a bit and finally goes belly up with the rest of the film —, Terry sends Commissioner Harvey a video of the fight. Actually, it’s a GIF, but that’s beside the point.
Never mind that this two-second footage proves absolutely nothing. The question is, how the fuck did Terry manage to record himself from a third person perspective? Did I miss the scene where Bones taught him to have an out-of-body experience? And it’s not like he taped two other inmates slugging it out, since I’m pretty sure the guards would have noticed the humongous nigga pointing a cellphone at the brawl.
At this point the movie simply goes full retard. In a lamebrained ‘twist,’ the Commish is revealed to have been in cahoots with the Warden all along — raising, among many others, the question of why he provided Terry with the means to document the goings-on in the prison, regardless of how poorly Terry puts this resource to use. Conversely, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Terry’s video, as useless as it is impossible, is somehow enough “to get the state authorities involved and to bring the corruption in this facility to their attention.” Terry slipped the phone chip to Janette (Arielle Prepetit), a pro-bono lawyer who drops in now and then to see him, but that still doesn’t explain how the footage found its way to “the state authorities;” shockingly — by which I mean not at all — the filmmakers can’t tell the difference between a SIM card and an SD card.
At the end, this same lawyer informs Terry that “The state has … agreed to give you a full pardon” and “to take care of your daughter’s medical costs.” In light of this unbridled generosity, I was half expecting the bitch to drop down on her knees and give Terry a sloppy BJ; what she does, however, give him, or rather, the audience, is a heavy-handed speech about how “it’s hard to regulate these corporate prison institutions. We just have no control over these private penitentiaries, so your evidence [what fucking evidence?] pushes the case for regulation. I mean regardless of what the men inside these walls have done, they’re still human beings and they deserve to be treated as such.”
Now, if only every ostensibly decent black man who has been pushed into a life of crime could singlehandedly dismantle a clandestine fight circuit/drug cartel fronting as a penitentiary — but then, such a place/situation would have to exist outside of a cliché-ridden, logic-defying action flick. It’s bad enough that the film’s message, such as it is, takes the form of an Author Filibuster (“… they are creating a new system. One of supply and demand of live human bodies. Mostly our people, black and brown people…” etc., etc.), but even if the premise weren’t trite and clunky and preachy, the filmmakers’ thorough inability to conceive and execute a coherent, feasible story precludes The System from joining the canon of great, gritty life-in-prison films (e.g., Brute Force, Le Trou, Short Eyes).
90% of Everything is Crap 