Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson Made a Movie About Mandatory Minimum Sentencing Laws…
In reality, there’s roughly ten cumulative minutes of killing in the movie. Snitch, directed and co-written by ex-stuntman Ric Roman Waugh, is a family drama about a father (played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) who reunites with his estranged son after the kid is thrown in prison due to Draconian mandatory minimum sentencing laws. The dad then does everything he can—including becoming a top informant for a federal prosecutor and the DEA—to get his first-time-offender son’s sentence reduced from ten years to zero. (The AARP has declared that this Dwayne Johnson movie is “really about good parenting.”) Things get even bleaker when his good-natured and once college-bound son starts getting routinely harassed and, as the film implies, raped by the tougher and larger inmates.
Snitch features a lot of somber music and family members, understandably, in tears. It’s hyper critical of the War on Drugs and the real-life mandatory minimum penalties that foster a counterproductive culture of “snitching.” When the promotional materials read that the film is “inspired by true events,” what that means is the script was based on a 1999 episode of PBS’ Frontline titled, “Snitch: How Informants Have Become a Key Part of Prosecutorial Strategy in the Drug War.” The episode examines two cases in which minor offenders got severe sentences based on the testimony of “snitches” who received sentence reductions in return for cooperating with authorities. Unlike the movie, the episode of PBS’ acclaimed investigative news program does not feature a climactic car chase involving a 9mm submachine gun and a big rig.
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