Screwed (18) 110 mins **
An unwritten movie law states any film with a past participle for a title is duty bound to be awful: see – or rather, don’t – the likes of Whipped, Botched and Scorched (with Alicia Silverstone) for proof. Screwed isn’t quite that bad – it’s an improvement on sometime Winehouse swain Reg Traviss’s previous directorial effort, 2006’s wholly inept war drama Joy Division. Still, as a bulletin on the state of the nation’s prisons, it’s unrevealing, and as drama, it plods along, never rising above the level of something destined to go out, mostly unwatched, on ITV4 at some point after the pubs have shut.
There’s a half-decent cast trying to make this their own personal Scum moment. James D’Arcy proves an ineffectual lead as Sam, the ex-squaddie family man driven to drug abuse by his new life as a warder, but there are showier parts for the great Frank Harper – master of the perfectly pitched F-word – as the most hardened of the screws, Jamie Foreman as the no-nonsense head warder, and Noel Clarke as the mocking con scheming to assume control of the prison drug trade. Shame the plotting should be so episodic – just a series of violent events that went dahn on jailer-turned-writer Ronnie Thompson’s watch – and that Traviss favours sensationalism over subtlety to make his points. You can stick to your Oz boxsets.
Screwed opens nationwide today.
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