Offender review

With ambitions of being the Scum of the London riot generation, Ron Scalpello’s brutal debut about a young offenders’ institution hammers its messages home with a sock full of snooker balls.

Joe Cole gives a weighty turn as the teen thug ricocheting through a terrifying system.

Despite running head-first into every prison cliché going, the scenes set on the inside are powered by such relentless grit and violence you can almost forgive the constant detours the film keeps taking into standard thriller territory – lacking the confidence to keep the whole film behind bars.