Some stuff is just too big to swallow whole.

Case in point: In the newly released Undisputed, the latest Wesley Snipes action vehicle opening today, there's an all-but-officially sanctioned, no-holds-barred championship boxing match between two prison inmates.

Now, considering what's been going on in Canadian prisons lately, it's not too hard to buy the premise that it would be possible to stage an illegal boxing match in a U.S. prison -- one that would garner international attention from the bookies without ever setting off alarm bells in the media or in the political arena.

So that's not the problem.

No, where director Walter Hill, who co-authored the screenplay with producer David Giller, stretches credulity to the breaking point is in asking us to believe that there are actually two pro athletes in America who would have to stay in prison long enough that the arrangements for such a fight could be made.

But we get ahead of ourselves.

In Undisputed, Snipes is cast as Monroe Hutchinson, a one-time, big-time contender in the boxing world who has been sent to the big house -- the big house being the maximum security Sweetwater Prison in the Mojave Desert -- for life for a crime of jealous passion.

In the 10 years he's been in prison, he's never lost a fight.

But now -- drum-roll please -- all that could change, because the World Heavyweight Champion, George "Iceman" Chambers, played by Ving Rhames, has been sent up for rape. Suddenly, Sweetwater has two champs.

Such a monumental coincidence is simply too much for another resident of this particular frat house -- an old time gangster with a taste for the ring (Peter Falk.) The profane and aged little troll immediately sets about arranging a cage match between the two boxers that involves everybody it seems but the prison warden and any legitimate boxing organization.

If it's punches you want to see thrown, and if you really like that particular "thunk," a noise reminiscent of a watermelon being struck by a baseball bat that they use to underscore the visual of a punch being landed, then chances are, you're going to love this movie. The fact that every single character seems to be introduced by the crime he's committed; that no one ever seems to get bruised or bleed too much from the fisticuffs (both gloved and bare-fisted) that go on; that, in offering as protagonists, a convicted rapist with a bad attitude and a convicted murderer with an attitude only slightly better, the filmmakers don't offer us much choice when it comes to rooting choices: These are niggling points that should never get in the way of a good fight, one assumes.

Depends how much you can swallow without chewing. (More on Undisputed)

(This film is rated AA)

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