Sold to the cineaste crowd as something of Pi meets David Cronenberg, this thriller proved to be as soulless as the gleaming surfaces of the eponymous prison.
The story: six people find themselves stuck in a hive of cubes, with no idea how they got there or why they were abducted. The characters fulfill the Breakfast Club conceit of evenly distributing attitude and aptitude: strong overbearing cop; whiny, heartfelt doctor; math geek chick; nihilist irony guy; thief and famed jailbreaker; and, most delightfully implausibly, autistic savant. They work together to unravel the puzzle of escape, while tangentially developing theories as to what is going on.
The elevation of math as life-saving device has made internet nerds apologists for this flick, as reviews on IMDB show. Don't listen to them. (As a general rule, don't listen to IMDB user reviews. The masses, alas, are asses.) The writing is terrible, and the doctor's and the cop's performances are overwrought telegraphed histrionics (which is made worse by the fact they have most of the lines).
Most annoyingly, the filmmakers fallback on existentialism, not in terms of providing any truly "No Exit"-like parable of life, but as a device for not having to provide any resolution to the story (leading me to think the filmmakers didn't know what was going on either).
My first thoughts when the final credits rolled were, "Can I have my hour-and-a-half back?" Save yours.
Six ordinary strangers awaken from their daily lives to find themselves in a seemingly endless maze of interlocking cubical chambers armed with lethal...More at HotMovieSale.com
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