★★
“Interesting premise, incredibly bland execution.”
I liked the idea of this. A gang of five thieves, four women and Liev, give up the game after a robbery goes wrong and Liev gets arrested. He doesn’t give up his accomplices, who include his pregnant girlfriend Willa (Banus), and goes to jail. Six years later their daughter falls ill, and desperately needs matching tissue to repair her heart valve. The bad news: it has to be her father, who’s still in prison. Worse news: he’s in a coma, having been beaten up on the orders of the governor. Willa decides to put the band back together, along with an unlicensed surgeon, to break into prison, and extract the necessary tissue to save her daughter.
That’s not something I’ve seen in a film before. It’s certainly a twist on the usual “women in prison” subgenre, and the scope for a tense thriller, as the reverse heist unfolds, is obvious. Unfortunately, it’s the best part of an hour before we get to the execution, and there’s not enough to retain interest. It doesn’t help that the plot has so many holes through which you could drive an oil tanker. For example, Flynn (Ma) gets a job in the prison library, becoming the gang’s inside woman. She’s gaily snapping cellphone photos inside the jail, when two minutes of Googling confirms exactly what I suspected – that every prison I could find, has an almost zero tolerance policy for mobile devices.
Though in general, this correctional facility has security roughly comparable to your local electronics store, and you will be left with little confidence in just about anyone involved in the penal industry. Not that Willa and her team can really claim the moral high ground here, if you think about it. They are the “good girls” only because the film tells us they are. Given the first thing we see them do is robbing an armoured truck by threatening the driver with an explosive device, I’m not sure that’s truly the case in any court of morality. I’d rather have seen them embrace this ambiguity in some way, rather than dropping in a cliche straight from a Lifetime movie, a desperately ill child. Who can possibly root against Willa now?
Indeed, in tone, a lot of this feels like it could have straight in from a TV movie. Things does pick up somewhat down the stretch, not least with some unexpectedly graphic open-heart surgery, and when Willa is forced to make an unexpectedly difficult choice. However, it likely counts as a minimal spoiler to say that all ends well – at least, for the majority of the cast – with justice served on the bad people. [Robbery, it appears, does not count…] From a technical point of view, it’s reasonably well-assembled: “competent” would be the word, though it’s equally lacking in flair. The highest praise I can give this, is to say that I did not fall asleep in the middle. Might have been close in the first hour, however.
Dir: Ted Campbell
Star: Camila Banus, Jasmine Shanise, Virginia Ma, Shonte Akognon