Corrective Measures is a strange film. It starts with a news montage explaining that human beings have started mutating and developing superpowers at random. If you’re imagining a straight-up rip-off of X-Men, it would be more accurate to imagine a rip-off of X-Men that the characters are working on in an episode of the sitcom Extras.

Pretty soon, however, the film shifts gears into a straight-up prison drama. This is about a prison within a superhero universe. Think Suicide Squad, but the characters don’t get sent on a mission and we, instead, just see how they live day-to-day. Once the movie settles into a groove and it becomes clear what it’s doing, it’s actually a pretty fantastic premise.

For the most part, the cast – notably Michael Rooker, Tom Cavanagh and, yes, Bruce Willis – do an admirable job of giving their absolute best to elevate the material they’ve got to work with. Sadly, the script is just so lacklustre that it’s largely in vain.

And while you get the sense that the film is doing a great job of getting the most out of its budget, it still ultimately feels like a claustrophobically small film, repeating the same few bland prison sets for most of its runtime. For the most part, this is trying to be something far beyond its reach and it shows.

The other major issue is the lack of imagination. The premise is still, ultimately, just the X-Men universe. And it’s not like we meet any interesting supervillain characters within it. All their powers are par for the course within the genre, be it the guy who can control electricity, the super-strong one or… another super-strong one.

There are unexpected moments of inspiration – spoiler alert: a post-credits scene for the sequel-that-will-never-happen teases a zombie/vampire apocalypse out of almost nowhere – but it’s always too much of an aside to really elevate the movie in any way.

Compared to some of its peers within the VOD landscape, you could do a hell of a lot worse than Corrective Measures, but it’s ultimately still a weak affair that isn’t worth your time. It will sadly only be remembered as one of the slew of bad films Bruce Willis pumped out at the end of his career.

Corrective Measures is released on Blu-ray and DVD on July 11th