Eye Candy #199 - "In Hell" (The Damme #9)

In Hell:  As I near the end of The Damme’s oeuvre, I’ve found myself watching more and more movies I didn’t even know existed, mostly because I thought people stopped giving The Damme work.  But then we have prison fight film “In Hell” (hardly The Damme’s first prison fight film, for that matter; look at “Lionheart”).   This time around he is Kyle Leblanc, an American working in Russia.  When his wife is murdered by a Russian hood who is then gets off scott-free due to judicial corruption, Leblanc takes justice into his own hand, kills the man, and finds himself sentenced to one of the finer establishments in the Russian penal system.  Once there, he finds himself the cellmate of 451 (yes, the character only has a number for a name, played by football legend Lawrence Taylor), who is a philosopher with a penchant for putting pliers in uncomfortable places.  Think of him like Tony Robbins with strong sociopathic tendencies.  Soon Leblanc finds himself the darling of an underground fight circuit between the prisons, which pits him against corrupt prison staff, other criminals, and his own baser instincts.  Your film is in BIG trouble when LT is the strongest actor in your cast.  Not the worst Damme flick I’ve ever seen, this Ringo Lam-helmed piece isn’t anywhere near the strongest or most entertaining.  Frankly, at this point, it seems like The Damme has been phoning in his performances since about 1997 or so.  The tropes are almost always the same.  Woodchuck sez, “Skip it.”