Walter Hill returns to the arena of his auspicious first film, the boxing arena, but this time inside prison walls instead of subterranean bare-knuckle streetfighting. He has by now hit the age of sixty, a codger by the standards of contemporary Hollywood: Walter Over-the-Hill. And seeing as how he has come so far without ever once succumbing to the lures of fashion and prestige, the important thing at this point would seem to be to finish out his career without tarnishing the achievement of Hard Times (that first one), The Driver, The Warriors, The Long Riders, Streets of Fire, Extreme Prejudice. This low-profile, low-tech action film will not do that. Nor will it do any more. Hill holds the de rigueur rap music to a tolerable minimum, but he can nonetheless be faulted for inflationary rhetoric in putting the reigning heavyweight champion behind bars on a rape charge (not that that in itself taxes credulity: we all know whom Hill is thinking of), where he can be matched up against a lifer who ten years earlier was a ranked heavyweight himself and is currently the undefeated Inter-Prison champ. There's nothing much doing until the fight, in fact so little that the ninety minutes must be filled out with pre-penitentiary flashbacks and archival prizefighting footage. The outside champ (Ving Rhames) intermittently punches someone to prove who's the Big Dog ("I ain't no punk-ass rapist!"), while the inside champ (Wesley Snipes) turns inward in solitary confinement and constructs a miniature pagoda out of toothpicks. No time is wasted on drumming up sympathy for either one of them, nor excitement over their nonstop, no-style slugfest. The movie is lean to the point of starvation, tough to the point of unchewability. Peter Falk, Jon Seda, Wes Studi, Michael Rooker. (2002) — Duncan Shepherd
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