It's one of them fancy French films that's sweeping the awardses.

Un Prophete is very long.
It's not one of those 150 minute flicks that feels shorter, in fact, it feels a lot longer than it should.
This is mainly because it's a story that takes place over years. And I use the word story rather kindly, gibbon that it's as generic as a prison movie gets and doesn't feel as interested in a story as much as a random slew of vignettes to which a premise is tied together with it.
I recently watched the fantastic 4 hour epic Mesrine starring Vincent Cassel, so I was excited to see some more French crime. The reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, and yet I feared it would be a Let The Right One In again, and it was. Both films add nothing to the genre and are far too dull to be satisfying, the only reason that LTROI and A Prophet have gotten better reviews than Twilight and any number of cliched drug dealing action films are because they are in a foreign language, if you can't hear the acting as much as read the script, you feel arty, right? Well, fine, feel arty, but I like good scripts to cap off good acting, neither of those rose above middle of the road, sometimes painful dialogue came about, or appallingly stupid plot twists, but most of all, the lack of anything engaging in the way of characters, especially in such a long effort, is horrible.
Our lead, Malik, starts off as a 19 year old going to jail for hitting a cop, he denies the cop aspect, not the 19 year old aspect, despite clearly being far too old for that. He goes in, gets beaten up, then some Italian-esque gangster group who are also freedom fighters make him kill a witness, the only person at the start who seems to care, and he's in to the group.

Up until this point I was trying hard to get into the film, I started feeling interested. But then we jump to a title saying "1 year later" and it all goes away, there's a small scene, and then we jump, without being informed, 2 more years. We're confused and annoyed at this point, and then we get a sideline of a drug enterprise story which runs through the rest of the film.
It's like it's tying not to break boundaries, every prison cliche you can think of is here, the mean authority, the violent inmates, aspects of homosexuality in the showers, smuggling drugs into the camp, it's never more than anything else ever made, the social realism is bland and predictable, the characters unengaging and annoying, this is simply a misfire on all accounts, an awful film.
3/10