Nothing in Ric Roman Waugh's prison
drama Felon will
surprise anyone who watched the HBO series Oz, but then, Waugh—a former
stuntman turned writer-director—never tries to pretend his movie is some
kind of searing original. Felon is a compact, pulpy film about the institutional
indignities that weaken the wills of prisoners and guards, shot in a jittery,
close-up style that emphasizes the feeling of walls closing in. Waugh is
primarily interested in capturing what it's like to live in a facility where
there's always someone eating, shitting, or fighting no more than two feet
away.
Stephen Dorff stars as an upwardly
mobile blue-collar worker sentenced to a year in prison for killing a man who
was trying to break into his house. During transport, Dorff happens to be
standing next to someone shanked by a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, and when
he refuses to tell the authorities what he saw, he's thrown into a wing with
the hard cases, where he has to share a cell with veteran badass Val Kilmer
(sporting a ridiculous-looking paste-on goatee and a Mickey Rourke body).
Kilmer informs Dorff that he'll have to join a gang to survive, and soon Dorff
is involved in daily bare-knuckle boxing matches in a 20'-by-20' exercise yard,
overseen by sadistic guard Harold Perrineau, who uses the prisoners to settle
his own scores.
Felon's dialogue is overheated and some
of its plot twists are preposterous, yet it's still white-knuckle tense, and
held together by dozens of small, well-observed moments. Once Dorff enters the
system, the circumstances of his crime don't matter anymore: The guards still
treat him as a con, and his fellow inmates still treat him as either an ally or
an enemy. And when his girlfriend comes to visit and sets off the metal
detector with an underwire bra, she gets strip-searched just like any other
moll. Waugh spends some time outside of prison with Perrineau, to show how
people on both sides of the wall make tricky moral decisions nearly every day.
The difference is that when Dorff compromises himself in order to get by, he
gets his sentence extended and a lecture from the judge. When Perrineau does
it, he still gets to clock out and go home.