Here is an aggressively mediocre action thriller, which does precisely nothing interesting with its barely existent premise. Even commenting on such a film that inspires no particularly interesting thoughts or angles requires latching on to something – anything – that might provide an entry point. That something in this case is the dichotomy between the performances given by Tyrese Gibson and Jeremy Piven as the film’s hero and villain, respectively.
“Hero” is used in this case rather loosely, because Gibson’s Terry Savage (despite what his surname might suggest) arrives onscreen with no personality and proceeds to do nothing with this blank slate of a role. Terry’s daughter is dying from some sort of illness, and his need for money to pay the medical bills, coupled with the lack of anything afforded him by Veterans Affairs, has pushed him into the criminal underworld. He is arrested and given a chance at freedom by the police commissioner (Ric Reitz): infiltrate a prison with an unruly warden, to determine whether the institution should be shut down for violating human rights laws. Terry is only happy to do it, if it means returning home to his daughter.
Inherently, there is much to say within this plot – about the private-prison system, which might as well be a stand-in for modern-day slavery, and about the poor state of veterans’ treatment by the world that welcomed them back. Writer/director Dallas Jackson shows no interest in exploring these loaded topics beyond turning them into lines of expository dialogue. It’s all to get us to that prison, overseen by the obviously corrupt Warden Lucas, for whom Piven adopts a silly Southern dialect for no discernible reason and as a replacement for any genuine personality of his own, and a co-conspirator whose identity is obvious from the moment we meet him.
Underneath the prison, the warden stages an underground fight club known as “the Dungeon,” and Terry’s job is to stay in mustache-twirler’s good fortune by always winning every fight. It is not much of a spoiler to reveal that Terry makes good on that promise, since the entire point of the film is to see Gibson wipe the floor with any challenger sent his way. The exception, of course, comes in the form of a surprise challenger, but by this point, the discerning viewer’s brain will have disengaged, having been given no reason to care about any of this nonsense.
There are other characters here, too, such as Terrence Howard as Terry’s cellmate Bones, who is in prison for a murder that he definitely committed and does not regret (hearing the details, neither do we, really), and rap artist Lil Yachty, who appears as the emcee of the fight club and otherwise should keep his day job. Nothing here means much or comes to any kind of intriguing fruition, and the scenes of hand-to-hand combat are pedestrian at worst and vaguely competent at best. The most that can be said about The System is that it passes by quickly. That doesn’t quite make up for the mystery of why anyone bothered to make it.
Photo courtesy of The Avenue
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