Small business owner Wade Porter (Stephen Dorff) lives a modest life with his fiancée Laura (Marisol Nichols)
and their three-year-old son. Everything changes in an instant, though,
when he’s convicted of killing a man who breaks into his home.
Sentenced to state prison, Wade ends up in a hellish facility overseen
by a guard (Harold Perrineau) who encourages gladiatorial fights among
the inmates. Though wanting to neither “fight or fornicate”
(the two delightful options given by one inmate, in slightly saltier
terms), Wade eventually yields to the former activity, in a paradoxical
attempt to protect himself and try to triangulate a position between competing Latino, African-American and Aryan skinhead gangs. When trouble mounts, his new cell mate,
John Smith, (Val Kilmer),
a burly, goateed “lifer” with his own dark devastation, provides
Wade with important guidance, all while ruminatively stroking his own tattoos.

Shot in hand-held,
super-confessional close-up, and on color-saturated Super16 blown up to
35mm, Felon doesn’t have much of revelatory value to say about the nature of violence
— indeed, its closing narration seems to endorse whatever-you-gotta-do
means. The flimsy, cardboard-thin set-up is meant to only get Wade into
prison (he cops to a murder charge since the fleeing culprit was
technically no longer on his property?), and the setting is meant to
only serve as an excuse for heavily tatted muscle-heads to use gang
slang, prison acronyms and flip each other around in gritty,
bare-knuckle fashion. See how that works? Still, in this regard, writer-director Ric Roman Waugh’s heavy background in stuntwork certainly pays off, as Felon, with its many boxers-and-sneakers brawls, rivals Eastern Promises in padding-free fisticuffs.

The
chief problem is that, despite invested performances by Dorff and
Kilmer, and after going to significant lengths to both establish a
sense of claustrophobic realism and depict Wade as being punished by an
unjust system, for not wanting to stoop to its calibrated levels of further dehumanization,
Waugh chucks all this for a contrived, mad-dash finale that requires
his protagonist bash in the brains of an “innocent” (a relative term
here, I realize) guy to get the proper attention of higher-ups, and
secure his release. Part cop-out, part simply bizarre, seemingly
concessional flourish, it’s a weird ending for a film that otherwise decently captures the grimness of prison life, and how it corrodes even those ostensibly in charge. One hopes, at least, the stuntmen were well compensated.

Housed in a regular Amray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, Felon comes presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, with English 5.1 Dolby digital and French Dolby surround audio tracks, and optional English and French subtitles. Apart from previews for other Sony home video releases, its sole bonus feature is a 13-minute making-of featurette — one of those deals that eats up its first 30 seconds with a clip-laden introduction. This irksome detail aside, Waugh charts the course of the film from inception through production (he even used gang-bangers as script consultants, for authenticity’s sake), and Dorff and stunt coordinator Mike Davis also pop up in a few interview clips. All in all, it’s OK, but a bit even more input from Waugh — both about his aesthetic decisions, but especially about the film’s location shoot at the New Mexico State Penitentiary — would greatly increase a sympathetic reading of this Felon. To view the film’s trailer, click here. To purchase it on DVD, click here. C+ (Movie) C (Disc)