Lockdown (2000)
Avery (Jones) returns to college as a competitive swimmer after getting his life back on track. But his life takes another unexpected turn when he and his two friends (Bonds, Casseus) are wrongly accused of murder and end up in prison.
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I am a big fan of prison movies but this movie really did not work for me. The plot was not very interesting with cookie cutter characters on top of that the acting was pretty poor. It rates four beers on my beer/movie rating system.
Many references to HBO's Oz have been made about this movie. The two are similar, but the gangs focused on here are limited to the Blacks and Aryans. The colorful actors are convincing in their roles. Master P comes across as a worthy heavy. Craig T. Jones provides the great contrast of clean cut protagonist. With a plethera of unwatchable exploitive black urban videos, Lockdown is a high quality cut above.
This film was so predictable that it almost scared me into thinking that I had become a psychic! I had to think about something, because there certainly was nothing in the film worth any brain cells. I think a group of amateur drama students in a high school could do a better job, if only having watched a few episodes of HBO's "OZ"!
Lockdown another film from ghetto cinema fanatic's No Limit Films is actually one of their best to come alone. The very talented and underrated Richard T. Jones plays Avery an aspiring swimmer who along with his boys Cashmere (Gabriel Casseus) and Dre (De'Aundre Bonds) get locked up for a crime they didn't commit. While in prison each of the boys follow a different path Avery ends by getting a valuable prison education from his Ralph Ellison-quoting cellmate Malachi (Clifton Powell), while Cashmere quickly becomes part of the African-American gang network operating under the leadership of Clean Up (Master P). Dre, meanwhile, meets the worst fate of the three, resorting to heroin after he's gang-raped by a group of Nazi thugs. Each of the three leads plays their roles with passion and the viewer feels what they are going through. Even Master P the king of ghetto method acting gives a good performance.