While watching this film I was guessing it was made late 80's into the early 90's. I was totally surprised to see that it was made in 1997, so the first thing I have to say is that the film looks bad for when it was made. A film about revenge featuring crew cut villains, villains that look like country music stars, ones that look like Shawn Michaels who even do super kicks and a woman carrying around an overly large shotgun which she never fires! This film has it all, including a bland group of prisoners led by a guy who would never have gotten convicted in the real world, a former cop who did nothing wrong in the first place and had numerous witnesses that could attest to this!
The story, a cop stops a hostage situation, but is sent to prison when he shoots a guy who pulls a gun on him. Well, the people who did the takeover want revenge! I guess so, not sure why they do or how the country music one is even alive after being shot in the face and chest or how he has recovered enough to do this caper of planting a bomb in a prison where the cop resides. Heck, not even sure why they are doing it other than the fact the leader is very anti middle eastern. Well, the warden who is super coward releases the prisoners and the cop now has to stop the evildoers in a movie that is like Die Hard in a prison, but with an extremely low budget!
The actors and actresses in this film are not very recognizable. I think the only one I may have seen before is the lead bad guy. My favorite character though had to be woman with the overly large shotgun who simply stands in different poses while holding the shotgun. She is in league with the terrorist, but still manages to get beaten by the reporter assisting the good guy...it's always a reporter.
So, this film is really bad and really cheap, but still manages to keep things moving along. Lots of people get shot, but thankfully the prison only has five prisoners in it, because I am sure they fill prisons at a slow pace. Mainly, you get a bunch of guys running through the same hallways over and over again, though one fight seems to inexplicably take place in a bottling plant. Yes, you get revenge, but I don't really think we got the maximum revenge the film's title promised.
