Prison dodgeball turned out to be a little different to High School

Dog Pound is writer/director Kim Chaperon and writer Jeremie Delon’s violently visceral fictional exploration of the American judicial system. Our questionable heroes are juvenile delinquents Butch (Adam Butcher), Davis (Shane Kippel) and Angel (Mateo Morales), detained for assault, drug possession and auto theft, they are far from the charmers we are used to seeing on the big screen.
 

This film pulls no punches. While the first half is relatively tame in comparison with the second, we are still thrown in at the deep end and find ourselves immediately immersed in the squalor and violence of our heroes and their world. It is fiction, and yet it feels incredibly real and walks the tightrope of fiction and documentary for the entirety. This is a result of the casting of many young actors straight from juvenile detention centres (method-acting at its finest you might say, as well as excellent writing and direction. Newcomer Butcher is outstanding here, and well on his way to becoming a star. In a nihilistic world, we save our hope for his character, the stamp of good acting

Dog Pound is the kind of movie that will have you walking home from the theatre infuriated, which in general is the sign of a bad movie experience. Somehow though, Chaperon and Delon have managed to turn that around and make viewer anger the very reason the movie works so well. Our ‘heroes’ are violent, arrogant, and self-obsessed, and yet despite the fact that if we met them on the street we’d be terrified, we still care about them. When we see the bullying and fear-mongering that peppers the majority of the film, we are irritated and wish that there was a better form of rehabilitation open to these kids. To me, this is the genius of the film’s creators, they throw us neck-deep into a violent world and somehow when we emerge we blame the a-moral cement that holds the system in place, rather than the angry hormone-driven men who are trapped within. It is art casting a bleak eye on the world.

Here is a film which, like its characters, makes its own rules and refuses to conform. It creates its own genre, and manages to escape the common trappings of Hollywood by refusing to allow a happy ending to creep in. Our heroes are stuck in Shawshank alright, but they’ll be waiting a long time for redemption.

Dog Pound paints a visceral damning portrait of a corrupt system and a violent world. This is the film to take your out-of-line teenager to, by the end they’ll be buying you a coffee and baking you cupcakes.

Ciara O’Brien