CIVIL BRAND Rating: (out of 5 stars) Director: Neema Barnette Producers: Neema Barnette, Steve "Black" Lockett, Jeff Clanagan, Carl Pedragal Writers: Preston A. Whitmore II, Joyce Renee Lewis Director of Photography: Yuri Neyman Cast: LisaRyae, N'Bushe Wright, Mos Def, DaBrat, Monica Calhoun, Lark Voorhies, Clifton Powell Visit the IMDB page for full cast and crew

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Review by: Warren Curry
8/25/03

It's always frustrating when filmmakers take material that is seemingly ripe with all sorts of provocative, dramatic possibilities and decide to turn it into a cartoon. A woefully failed attempt at examining the brutality, hypocrisy and corruption of the prison system -- in this case, the focus is a women's correctional facility -- director Neema Barnette's Civil Brand draws a picture of oppressed vs. oppressor in a crudely black and white manner that's almost unfathomable in its simple-mindedness. Even from the standpoint of pure propaganda the film fails miserably -- it's nowhere near clever enough to even be manipulative.

An inmate named Sabrina (DaBrat) narrates our tour of Whitehead Correctional, a women's prison ruled by arguably the most clear-cut villain the film world has ever seen, Captain Dease (Clifton Powell). The vicious Dease runs the place, but always must keep one eye squarely focused on his boss, Warden Nelson (Reed R. McCants), a business man turned law man, who recognizes the huge financial potential in exploiting his workforce of prisoners. Dease is a law enforcement veteran and has a sore spot for the influx of white-collar types infiltrating his domain; this problem is further heightened when Nelson hires Michael Meadows (Mos Def) -- a college graduate and family friend of the warden's -- who joins the prison as a corrections officer.

Aside from young Sabrina, the motley bunch of inmates includes the woman nobody messes with, Nikki (N'Bushe Wright), the gentle preacher, Lil Momma (Lark Voorhies), Dease's informer, Aisha (Tichina Arnold), and the newbie who serves as something of a moral center to the film, Frances (LisaRaye). The familiar prison movie elements show themselves throughout the course of the film -- co-existing factions, prisoner-on-prisoner violence, authority-on-prisoner violence and an inmate upheaval. But it's all told in such a rote, connect-the-dots fashion that relies on totally over-the-top characterizations to amp the drama.

If the one-note character sketches weren't damning enough, director Barnette also frequently clues you into the arrival of the "bad guys" by cueing up the ominous, evil score when the prison officials enter a scene. Her crowded, space-challenged compositions seem to be framed through a tiny box, as the look of the film screams straight-to-video.

Preston A. Whitmore II and Joyce Renee Lewis' cliché-riddled script doesn't give the director much with which to work. The narrowness of their point-of-view eliminates any hope of taking their message seriously. The broad overview of their premise is a sound one (if not anywhere close to original), but they only use the most generic of strokes to handle the specifics. Mos Def's fish-out-of-water officer presents the sort of moral ambiguity that really begs further exploration, but is reduced to a throwaway plot device.

Also imprisoned by the script are the actors, with Clifton Powell going the most overboard as the iron-fisted Captain Dease. N'Bushe Wright's Nikki might just be the most beautiful person ever to step foot on prison grounds, and her appearance in this movie makes me wonder why we don't see her more. She was off to a great start in the mid-90s with very solid performances in Zebrahead (while we're at it, whatever happened to that film's director, Anthony Drazan?) and the Hughes Bros.' Dead Presidents, but has largely disappeared from sight.

Civil Brand's goal is ostensibly to enlighten the viewer about the horrors of prison life, but its effect may only serve to remind people of how off-base media depictions of the darker environments in our society can be. There were most likely some very positive intentions behind the creation of Civil Brand, but so many things obviously went terribly awry from conception to end result.

(A Lions Gate Films release. Opens in limited release on August 29, 2003.)