My quick rating – 4.5/10. Shackled opens with the kind of ominous ’80s synth music that had me thinking something serious is about to happen. Police line the streets to contain a robbery, bullets start flying, and a criminal gets dropped. Then we cut to a man having a nice dinner with a woman while apologizing for his past mistakes. The movie keeps bouncing between the two scenes, repeatedly focusing on the RAPP tattoos on their hands, because apparently subtlety was denied parole.
Then the thief gets taken out in a hail of bullets and some very enthusiastic CGI splatter. A cop searches for his RAPP “match” on a laptop, and suddenly the guy having dinner appears to have his heart explode. He’s dead too. Welcome to the future, where parole apparently comes with a built-in murder button.
In this dystopian setup, the traditional parole system has been replaced by R.A.P.P., the Recidivism Accountability Partnership Program. White-collar ex-con Greg (Graham Powell) gets paired with Max (Armen Garo), a sociopathic gangster with terminal cancer. Both men have explosive charges surgically implanted in their hearts, meaning one wrong move by either of them can result in both being turned into a very brief medical emergency.
The premise is easily the best thing Shackled has going for it. There’s a genuinely interesting movie hiding in here about forced partnerships, government control, second chances, and a system that decides the easiest way to prevent repeat offenders is to give them synchronized heart bombs. Unfortunately, the movie keeps finding ways to take the less interesting road.
The synth music also needs a mention because Shackled really, really likes it. It pops up so often that I was sure at one point somebody would saunter into the shot with shoulder pads on and holding a brick cell phone. The music is pretty good, but the film depends upon it so much that every scene seems to become about selling me a videotape copy of it.
Things get more interesting when human organ trafficking enters the story. That subplot opens the door to some much darker and more compelling possibilities, but Shackled doesn’t do nearly enough with it. It feels less like a major development and more like the movie briefly discovered a much better plot and then wandered away from it.
Fortunately, however, the acting is quite good. Powell is the film’s focus as Greg, and Garo is sufficiently threatening as Max to make their pairing work well when it otherwise wouldn’t. Powell also wrote the screenplay, and he at least gives the ending a cynical edge that fits the world the movie created.
That’s ultimately my biggest frustration with Shackled. It has a good idea. Maybe even several good ideas. But all I could do was wait for it to do something more interesting with them. However, it settled on being just an okay dystopian thriller rather than something much better.
