Craig Fairbrass (Villain, Muscle, Rise of the Footsoldier franchise) is an actor who may lack range but has an undeniable screen presence. He emits an almost radioactive glow with his hulking, jolie-laide physiognomy, amplified by an abraded, East End baritone that seldom rises above a menacing whisper. That charisma goes a long way in this prison drama, written and directed by Ross McCall, which consists of a weary procession of scenes in which Fairbrass’s longtime convict Steve Mackelson growls, glowers and recites monologues full of self-serious pauses about prison life and how hard he thinks he is.
All this seems to take place in one or two rooms in one of Her Majesty’s establishments where budget cuts appear to have deprived the cells of lightbulbs. A moderate amount of backlighting is supplied by a strip of window high in one black wall. No wonder the supporting officers (SOs) can never tell what’s going on. The deprivations also extend to the prisoners’ and support officers’ language, worn back to the stubs of self-expression so that they can only speak in prison slang (“tooled up”, “burner”, “peas” and the like) or the word “cunt”, which in this world is so ubiquitous it’s practically a pronoun.
