Travis (Adrien Brody) is a little down on his luck. He’s just gotten laid off at his job where the benevolent peace keeping tree hugger takes care of old people, and his girl (Maggie Grace) is off to India to discover the meaning of life. Travis would like to join her but my man doesn’t have two nickels to rub together to make heat. You would think if this woman really wanted Travis to come along she would’ve footed the bill but Travis clearly can’t take a hint. Travis needs some cash. Travis sees an add in the paper where an experiment is offering test subjects 1000 dollars a day for their participation. If you are like me you know that’s way too much money for one days worth of untrained, unskilled labor and something has to be terribly wrong, but Travis really wants to go to India so he ignores what we over here see as obvious. The name of the movie is ‘The Experiment’ and this experiment is about to get underway.

With our volunteers chosen they are carted via a charter bus to an out of the way prison facility and briefed by the person heading this experiment, one Dr. Archaleta (Fisher Stevens). Again, the minute we saw Fisher Steven we knew he was up to no good and we would’ve backed out, but that’s just us. It’s a fourteen day experiment where a small subset of these men will be prison guards with the remainder being the prisoners. The guards job is to keep order while the prisoners are simply to follow these orders. If anybody gets out of line, if the rules are broken and consequences aren’t enforced and if any kind of violence is used then the experiment is over and nobody will get their fourteen large.

Simple enough, but the issues pop up almost immediately. The prisoners, Travis in particular, aren’t really buying into the whole ‘prisoner concept’ and the guards have little idea how make the unruly prisoners behave without using physical violence. Well, say hello the meek, mild, devout Christian and pathetic momma’s boy Barris (Forest Whitaker). He remembers his old frat days where his pledge brothers had pretty much the same limitations, but that didn’t stop them from getting their point across to the plebes. You can’t beat ‘em but you can humiliate ‘em. Little did Barris realize that stripping someone of their basic human liberties and constantly humiliating them could be so damn exhilarating.

It doesn’t take long before this experiment veers wildly out of control as the guards exert their will upon their prisoners with torture, rape, emasculation and humiliation being the order of the day. Before the experiment, Travis the tree hugger didn’t believe he was capable of violence. Now Travis wants to hug Barris’ face with his fists. And that’s day one… thirteen days to go.

Oddly detached and disaffecting is the experience I felt while watching ‘The Experiment’, a movie that is also somewhat erratic and inconsistent. The film starts by showing society at its worst, stronger animals exerting their will over the weak, authority abusing its power over the defenseless and revenge taking the place of justice, with a lot of these clips being very familiar to anyone who has followed the news over the last decade or so. But what does this mean in context to what we are about to experience? I know what it’s supposed to preface, but I don’t believe it actually gets there.

In this movie money is the driving force since almost every person in the group that we are engaged with is doing this for the hope of ending the two weeks with fourteen grand in their pockets, with the central theme, I guess, being that people will do just about anything for money. Except the simplest of things. Our prisoners resist even the most benign orders from the guards which, of course, leads to total chaos and anarchy. We knew this is where the movie had to be but getting to this point didn’t feel genuine or natural.

Out of chaos order must rise and thus birth is given to baby Hitler over here in Barris. Forest Whitaker’s rapid descent from milquetoast to madness, while completely unbelievable, was at least entertaining. But then this also adds to the unevenness in that Barris’ descent is rapid and unbelievable while Travis’ ascent is gradual and understandable. A lot more care was taken in creating Travis character in that we knew he was capable of violent acts before he was admitted to the experiment, with his issues being more of a question of control, but not so with Barris. The other characters served the purpose of kindle and plot devices to keep the movie on its predictable explosive path.

There was something missing from ‘The Experiment’ that kept from me from becoming completely engaged in its narrative, despite the interesting way that this narrative is setup and the heavy duty hardware behind the lead actors in this tale. It’s not a terrible movie by any means but considering the talent involved and the intriguing subject matter it did feel as if it should’ve been better.