Civil Brand

It's impossible to ignore the strain of misogyny that taints the movie.

Barnette, a veteran TV director, means this as an expos of prison abuse and exploitation, but the film is too simplistic and derivative to succeed.

Artistically, its heavy-handed clumsiness undercuts its goals.

It presents a heated-up, awkward blend of earnest outrage and down-and-dirty exploitation.

Plagued by continuity problems, ham-fisted storytelling and a problematic voiceover by Da Brat, Civil Brand feels less like a prison movie than a prison sentence.

Without a scorcher like Pam Grier, the sub-NYPD Blue dialogue and acting dilute what could have been a shrieking wake-up call about for-profit prisons.

Wildly uneven, rife with a virtual checklist of human tragedies that build to easy emotional crescendos but fail to engage the audience well enough to evoke any meaning.

It's guilty of gross B-movie meltdown, but mitigating circumstances include honest anger and a scattering of vivid scenes.

This is a film about the abuses of privatization and presents a negative view of what might happen if corporate America gets control of the business of corrections.

There's way too much of the usual bonding, beatings, petty humiliation by guards, cat fights in the yard and trips to the hole.