It's a film about juvenile delinquents where a young Sean Penn and Esai Morales play two characters who dislike each other but have no real reason to hate each other until circumstance forces them to.
So there's this drug deal going down with this Puerto Rican gang and there's this one Irish kid ''Mick O'Brien'' who knows about it. He wants to steal the money (possibly the drugs as well) and make an easy buck. But things go sour and the kid (Irish) while trying to escape accidentally runs over the brother of a different kid who was in the Puerto Rican gang. All before getting caught by the police and sentenced to a juvenile detention centre.
Now the one Puerto Rican kid "Paco Moreno" is that on the street and fuming. He wants revenge for the death of his brother. But he can't hurt the guy who did it because he's behind bars. So he takes out his frustration on the guy's girlfriend who he rapes than treys to kill.
He's caught by the police before he can kill this poor girl. And because of an incredibly screwed up prison system and overbooking he ends up in the same Juvenile Detention Centre as the Irish kid who killed his brother.
Now while all that is going on O'Brien (Still in prison) starts moving up the ranks. There are these two bigger kids who go around harassing everybody else and keeping all the punks in line. They get first dibs on the cigarettes, they get to assign people different jobs, they even get time taken off of their sentence for keeping the peace per-se. O'Brien becomes the new boss of the detention centre more through Brute Force than actual Charisma, but power is power.
Then all of that gets flipped on its head when Paco enters the situation.
There's an attempted Escape plot that happens and a bunch of other smaller things that make up the bulk of the film.
It's a very well-acted, decent setup of a film. The story is a little paint by numbers. You can kind of guess most of the situation before it would happen and it also feels a bit aimless up until the third Act. But I'd still recommend it to anybody who likes prison drama movies or is a fan of The Outsiders.
the general performance is enough to keep you intrigued. Although there's no true character development everybody has enough of a personality trait that you're still kind of investing in what they're doing. It's like watching an episode of Matlock. You know how it's going to end but it's more about how they get there.
They don't paint the kids up as anything great either. Every kid who's in that juvenile hall is a piece of trash. Their arrogant, self-appointed, sneaky and manipulative. And they never really clean up their act. That might discourage some people from rooting for any of these characters when you realise that they're all pretty bad. But at the same time I like the honesty of seeing a bunch of delinquents running around.
You get a real sense that these are bad kids. There's a great part at the beginning or the Irish kid arrives at the Juvenile Hall. And you think that maybe he's the biggest bad of the bunch because he accidentally killed somebody but then you hear about everyone else's crimes. Have these kids have murdered somebody some of them have done it in a grotesque manner. Even the roommates to O'Brien who supposed to be this lucky more kind personality turns out to be a little scumbag.
Also Clancy Brown is in this movie. I'm always happy to see him popping up in stuff. He never gets to play anything that isn't just a Jar head though.
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