TV Reviews : ‘Rage’ Has a Hard Time With Realities of Prison

Cheryl Ladd gives new meaning to the term model prisoner in the CBS movie “Locked Up: A Mother’s Rage” (tonight at 9 on Channels 2 and 8), pretty as a picture after years of unjust incarceration, and perky, too, except for the odd nervous breakdown in solitary confinement.

Ladd isn’t really the problem with this telepicture, which has among its woes a script stuck somewhere in the twilight zone between the cliches of old-fashioned women-behind-bars pictures and an unrequited desire for fleeting realism. Certainly the campy exploitation of a “Jackson County Jail” is well outside what’s being aimed at here, but this is still miles short of a genuinely gritty treatment like “Prison Stories: Women on the Inside,” HBO’s superior anthology movie last year, which also had moms in the slammer.

This saga was naturally “inspired by actual events” (what recent TV movie hasn’t been?), but manages to feel generic and underplotted as can be. In short order, single mother Ladd agrees to a date with an unshaven cad, gets arrested and framed for carrying his wad of cash, and is quickly convicted for cocaine dealing while the real culprit gets probation.

The story of maternal separation should by all rights be heart-tugging, but too many inevitable conventions of the genre keep getting in the way--like the nasty inmate who torments Ladd for no reason in particular (until repenting because, surprise, she has a kid too), or the nice, pregnant girl bound never to know natural motherhood. No clemency for this one.