Director: Martin Campbell
Year: 1994
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: The Penal Colony
Genre: Action
There's quite a lot to like with this one. One of the biggest factors to this one is the rather fun setup which offers the potential for great action and some fun storyline concepts. The idea of the prison island operating as a lawless wasteland with people wanting and willing to fight to survive the others as a secondary group opposing them allows for a series of impressive plot points. Offering the idea of the differing viewpoints in the groups who are involved on the island, where one manages to employ a more peaceful and harmonious take on their situation while the other group is concerned with brutality and viciousness to an absurd degree, creates an intriguing contrast between everything. By doing all this in a truly inescapable island setting where they're trapped together under the prison rules, it all completes this rather intriguing and enjoyable setup.
That allows the action present to be quite exciting and generally raucous. Focusing on the expected gun-battles and guerilla combat tactics perfectly integrated into the island setting here becomes rather exciting with the confrontations generating some fun back-and-forth sequences. With the action taking place throughout the island within the jungle or the various compounds of the individual groups bring a lot of firepower to these sequences as the stunt-work and gun-play provide some rather fun aspects here even if it does bring about a somewhat overlong running time here that doesn't really justify the near two-hour running time. Some of the final half is a bit overlong and repetitive but there's not much in the way of flaws otherwise with this one.
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