To be blunt, those American caricatures from 'Heirs' and 'The King 2 Hearts' were so badly acted and written I can't claim to have seen something so bad even among the propaganda films of World War II. At least, in Hollywood, they pony up enough money to hire real actors for roles like that.

The American films about foreign prisons, like American films about American prisons, run the gauntlet from classy to B movie stereotypes to trashy cliches. 'Midnight Express', the most famous of them, raised some fuss in Turkey and exaggerated the horrors of that particular case, but there was nothing in it that could not have happened in a real Turkish prison of the period. On the other hand, as I noted, there are American prisons that exist right now, mainly in the South and Southwest that are nearly as terrible.

Thing is, just about all of those stories are biased - perhaps not by intent. If a country has 1000 prisons, and 2 of them are horrible, nobody will notice the other 998.

And I will bet you a barbequed lizard that the French prison in this movie is depicted as horrible, and that the police are depicted as brutal, probably a modern day version of Devils Island.

There ARE some pretty horrible prisons - some of the ones in Brazil and Columbia have been compared to North Korean labor camps, but far too often the media hype does not equal reality.