A little thrown off by the "excessiveness" in the beginning of this film I was pleased to see the pace quickly changed into an intriguingly heart wrenching and fist clenching experience. Pulling no punches in exposing the cruelty that exists in these rehabilitation centers you frequently find yourself a little uneasy with this films content (especially upon remembering that this was based on true events). A lot of content is crammed into this sole title as the story is a melting pot of drama, action, and even a relatively strong love story. Not a dull moment is to be found within this running time. The visuals compliment the story well with a beautiful setting and equally stunning cast.

Supposedly based on real events, this is about teenagers being sent away to camps to be disciplined. We follow a couple who go there and seek to escape. The characters aren't bad, and this is psychologically credible all the way. Unfortunately, the acting tends to be pretty... "meh". Even Stormare, if he does have his moments, struggles. Smith delivers the best performance(someone give this man more roles, seriously). Kunis is OK, as usual. This has some stylization to portions of it, without it getting to be flashy. This is directed(by the guy who did the pretty good Human Trafficking mini-series, and the utterly biased Hitler bio-pic),shot and edited well. It's genuinely effective at times, with a fairly good pace and a relatively satisfying climax. The tension reaches nice high levels at times, and this is exciting here and there. It is a bit predictable. The exploration of how some of the people leading the spot have become corrupted by their power and what these kinds of extreme conditions do to even normal human beings are convincing, if not news to people who look into this stuff even casually. This suffers from there not being much memorable to it other than this, and, frankly, I feel it would have been a more compelling documentary. There is a lot of disturbing content and sensuality, and brief nudity in this. The DVD comes with five trailers and nothing else(including scene selection menus)... that's *bare*. I recommend this to fans of Gregory. 6/10

Sophie (Mila Kunis) is an impetuous teen who rebels against her domineering stepfather Carl. After embarrassing him, he sends her away to fake doctor Hail (Peter Stormare)'s isolated boot camp Camp Serenity on Fiji island for a year. Her boyfriend Ben (Gregory Smith) fakes a drug problem to get to the camp. It's a place of disturbing psychological torture and brutality enforced by security chief Logan.

This is an useful movie for parents to see the waving red flags. The most obvious red flag is Fiji. It's a bad move to send your kid outside of proper legal jurisdiction. I wouldn't send kids to Columbia either. An isolated island halfway around the world with no visitation should obviously be a big red flag. Then there is the coed situation. Why would parents send their girls to a coed prison? That's a recipe for disaster. The problem for this movie is that it seems to be trying to make a point about all of the boot camps. Then it makes the case with the strangest and weirdest situation. Mila Kunis also fails miserably to engender any sympathy for her character. This would be a little better by making this more of an outlandish Lord-of-the-Flies story. By trying connecting it to reality, it fails as realistic and fails as a drama.