How sad is this?

Beautiful, moving film.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

This movie was a complete surprise. I have always seen Van Damme as a great action hero and most of his movie doesn't have any story. When I started watching this one, I expected same action stuff but it completely took me by surprise. The movie started with some action stuff but then on the real story evolves. There is no big surprises around but it was not all out action. Van Damme managed to emote well and the prison torture scenes were well done. After seeing this film,most of us will fear to death if we even dream of getting into a prison like this. All actors as prison wardens and inmates given the movie the exact feel it needed.Watch this movie without any expectation and you wont be disappointed..

As a loyal JCVD fan,I would go as far to say that this and Wake Of Death and Until Death,JCVD,and Assassination Games are Van Damme's better movies of the new millennium.This was not just another martial arts movie,this had action,drama,thrills and a heart felt storyline.As far as Van Damme acting this was a decent effort.Van Damme can act more in dramas than just all action films.I originally thought that this was just simply another prison movie just like Death Warrant.Death Warrant although one of my favourites lacks the decent acting performance Van Damme attempts here.And i believe he pulled it off and made a decent movie for the first time in years.You can feel his pain through the movie,and sympathise with Van Damme character here from start to finish.Marnie Alton from Replicant was starring alongside Van Damme again,she is a beautiful and decent actress.I feel she puts some effort in to this movie and fits her role perfectly.This is a good movie if you enjoy Van Damme or just want to pass the time.If you want a lot of blood and killings watch Wake Of Death.If you want action and decent fight scenes then watch In Hell.

IN HELL has an extremely familiar plot. Man has girlfriend/wife murdered/raped, the law fails him, he kills the murderer/rapist and is thrown into a jail full of sodomites, sadists and thugs, all presided over by evil prison guards.The acting is extremely unconvincing, especially that of the other American who turns up in prison. The script is predictable beyond belief. JCVD actually begins the film by promising his wife, who wants to go back home to the USA, that not only will they do that but that he has also booked them a holiday. Her prompt rape and murder by a greasy looking foreigner was practically inevitable after that.The film is clearly trying to be a little bit more than another exploitation flick made in Eastern Europe, throwing in a few psychological elements and one or two interesting shots. Clearly someone felt they could do more than make another JCVD film. Sadly they failed and the film is the usual mix of brutal violence, cliché and poor acting. No matter how much fast editing they do, it can't disguise the paucity of quality on display.

Post the release of Timecop in 1994, or arguably Sudden Death the year after, Jean Claude Van Damme has churned out sub-standard actioners that even his undemanding fans have struggled to praise. His career reaching a nadir with the quite dreadful Derailed in 2002. He was literally stuck in the kind of straight to DVD hell that Steven Seagal has been in for the last 15 years. So it was something of a surprise to find that this 2003 film bucked the trend considerably. Now this is no rocket science head scratcher for the action genre fan, it's riddled with prison movie clichés and is as unoriginal as it gets. But it finds Van Damme filling out a role with more depth than the standard beefcake hero roles he was doing in his sleep. If this was a shift that he personally chose to do after having enough of the "for the money only films?" I'm not quite sure, but the result is a brutalistic action piece that contains possibly his second best performance after the critically praised JCVD in 2008.The plot is simplicity extreme, Van Damme stars as Kyle LeBlanc, who along with his wife is residing in Russia due to work commitments. His wife is raped and murdered and Kyle is aghast as the Russian courts free the culprit on technicalities and bribery sweeteners. He's not having that so promptly guns down the man and gets sent to a hell hole prison for life. Here violence and sexual assault are the order of the day, with the governor happy to put on brutal fights to the death purely for his, and his friends, entertainment. Kyle is not a violent man but he's forced to become violent just to survive.Yes it's a pretty formulaic as it sounds, you could run thru about ten prison based movies and find the best bits of them used in here. But it does work because of Van Damme's character. He's a good man thrust into a violent world, he gets bullied, he gets desperate, he is out of his depth. It's here that the film differs in the Belgian's career, for he doesn't flex his martial arts muscles, there's no high kick, slow-mo set pieces here. This sees him fighting normal man style, and this only after going thru a Rocky Balboa type training regime. As expected, the fight scenes are violent and Van Damme is immensely competent executing them. Hell! There's even religious and spiritual metaphors in here! I kid you not. In Hell is a must for action film fans, and certainly a must for Van Damme fans who gave up on him by the late 1990s. You will not be surprised by how the plot unfolds, and a couple of corny scenes drop in to say hello (ghost visitations, dear me), but you hopefully will be surprised at Van Damme's performance. And of course there's always some serious buttock kicking action to chew on as well. 7/10