What is most frustrating about Civil Brand is that it fails to live up to it's potential. Who better to tell this tale of black women lost in a system more concerned with profit and oppression than penance and rehabilitation than women and men at the forefront of hip hop? The talented and respected Neema Barnette has MC Lyte, Da Brat, Mos Def, and the wonderful N'Bushe Wright at her disposal and loses them in a connect-the-dots story that aims to be challenging but feels incredibly pedestrian.
Clifton Powell's as the evil Captain Deese is an enjoyable performance but it's played so over-the-top that it's not easy to take him seriously. The battle between he and N'Bushe Wright's Nikki Barnes over who has the real juice in the prison rarely hits its mark. To the film's credit, at least N'Bushe Wright's performance feels genuine. When Deese finally cracks her hardened shell and forces her to submit to his will by saying "I'll be a good bitch" the futility of existence within this prison system becomes real and palpable. These moments happen far too rarely.
Though the capping point of the film is when the prisoners enlist the aid of C.O. Michael Meadows, who is also a law student, to unravel that Whitehead is indeed a cog in the prison-industrial complex, and later design a scheme to end the prison's injustice, for many viewers the message might become lost in the film's reliance on melodrama. Where hip hop has a unique ability to give an accurate sense of the desperation and grim reality of the streets and of the choices that lead to lives of crime, Civil Brand could have been awe-inspiring, highlighting the consequences of those choices and the distorted world it puts black women and men in, but instead it falls short.
As Frances, LisaRaye explains to Nikki that despite always following the rules she somehow ended up in prison. Nikki responds, "I ain't never followed the rules and we end up in the same place. Ain't that some shit?" No, the shit is that these filmmakers could have made a fresh film with the merit of The Shawshank Redemption but ended up with something not much better than Reform School Girls.
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Jason Toney. Movie Review: Civil Brand. Copyright 2003 Vibe.com.
