This movie kicks off with a gruesome explicit gory tooth-pulling exercise within prison, shortly followed by a sexual assault and murder scene. It’s clearly trying to distress the viewer while unravelling the backstory.
Van Damme’s character soon finds himself in jail, sentenced to life behind bars without the possibility of parole, for killing his wife’s murderer who paid off the judge and escaped all charges.
Within 20 minutes there’s a fairly explicit depiction of prison guard organised sexual assault by one inmate against another in exchange for money paid to the prison guards. Van Damme spots a resemblance in the rude mannerisms of the perpetrator, to the guy who killed his wife, and starts a fight with him. From here, he’s locked away in a filthy solitary cell, and tries to kill himself, but fails. Next, he finds himself sharing a cell with someone who has a habit of killing his cellmates.
About half an hour in, Van Damme makes some friends – with the victim from earlier, and a guy in a wheelchair. Soon after that, it gets more interesting, as we start to see organised prison fights. Unfortunately the fight announcer is an extroverted cross-dresser, but when that’s out of the way we can start to see the meat & gravy of this movie warming up nicely. Still, it’s not till nearly an hour in when Van Damme first participates in one of the organised prison fights. There’s a lot more drama and a lot less action in this movie than there probably ought to be, so far as Van Damme’s usual fan base are concerned. Add to that the various forms of unpleasantries and I don’t think I can rate this movie any higher than So-So, on a par with Death Warrant – another Van Damme prison movie released 13 years prior to In Hell.
To its credit, the final boss that Van Damme fought in this movie probably inspired the final boss that Scott Adkins fought in Undisputed 4, some 13 years later again.