Review: In ‘Shot Caller,’ Prison Hardens Nikolaj Coster-Waldau’s Character

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“Shot Caller” is the third feature from Ric Roman Waugh (“Snitch,” “Felon”) to illustrate the notion that prisons make criminals instead of reforming them. Once a man is institutionalized, a character in “Shot Caller” says, “anything is possible.”

To prove that thesis, “Shot Caller” stretches “anything” well beyond credulity. Involving yet trivializing, the movie unfolds as a would-be “Breaking Bad” of the prison genre, following an inadvertent criminal who is hardened by a gangland behind bars and eventually becomes one of its cleverest members.

Before incarceration, Jacob Harlon (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, from “Game of Thrones”) is a stockbroker from Pasadena. When he’s arrested after a fatal drunken-driving accident, concomitant charges and sentencing guidelines leave him in a bind that sends him to prison for far longer than he and his wife (Lake Bell) anticipated. Once there, he falls under the protection of a white-power gang; proves his cred by murdering a snitch; and meets the Beast (Holt McCallany), a prison leader who spouts aphorisms (“a warrior’s deadliest weapon is his mind”) and who supposedly runs California from his open-air cage.

“Shot Caller” interweaves before-and-after timelines, toggling between Jacob’s initiation and his life after release, a decade later, as a tattooed, muscular ex-con plotting an arms deal. Both the prison and the gangs have rules, Jacob says, but the gangs’ rules matter. “Shot Caller” effectively conveys the vise grip of Jacob’s options, but that doesn’t make it less ludicrous from scene to scene.

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