UndisputedDirected by Walter Hill A Miramax release Opens Friday at area theaters

The first scene in Walter Hill’s Undisputed is a fight that takes place at a high-security, Oz-like panopticon prison called Sweetwater, out in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Two inmates go at it inside a huge cage, surrounded by other men who roar and thump their approval against the bars. The camera circles, rises, peers through the bars, unable to keep still. It’s all a fitting, if overwrought, metaphor, as the film concerns prisoners who fight to maintain their sense of individual honor, or at least to gain respect from the bar-thumpers. Masculinity, integrity, brutality: Hill’s usual themes.

Then comes a little tweak, in the "entertainment" staged between bouts (the prison administration apparently permits such proceedings to go on for some time). Hey, it's Master P. He raps a little, gets the cons chanting "rock 'n' roll," the camera gaga and restless all around him. Within moments, before you can say "Unnhh," he's gone.

This has to be one of the oddest film roles in history. In a movie scored by Cash Money Millionaires (not his own No Limit crew), Master P gets prominent mention in the credits (albeit as "Rapper 1") and, with his head-rag and platinum teeth, he's surely recognizable. He actually comes back later, to lead his real-life brothers, Silkk the Shocker and C-Murder (currently jailed, awaiting a murder trial) and assorted cons in a hip-hoppish version of the national anthem. Master P has not a word of dialogue in the film. What is he doing here?

Granted, this isn't a question that will bother most viewers. Many won't even register Master P's existence, and others will attend to the film's central action, namely, a much drawn-out battle between two mighty boxers, played by two charismatic and extremely hard-bodied performers. The trappings -- the hackneyed plot, the stock characters, the references that might have been topical when the movie was shot and then shelved a couple of years ago -- are as inconsequential as Master P's four-second-long appearance.

Inspired in part by the Mike Tyson saga -- the pre-biting part, when he was convicted for the rape of Desiree Washington -- the film begins when heavyweight champion James "Iceman" Chambers (Ving Rhames) comes to Sweetwater, choppered in rather than taking the usual long hot bus ride. Of course, many of the other inmates -- and the white warden (Denis Arndt) and white head guard (Michael Rooker) -- resent his black celebrity and are wholly unimpressed by his protestations of innocence. The film also includes repeated bits of a television interview by his victim (Rose Rollins), in which she insists that she didn't want to hurt him, only to assert her rights. So she's suing him in civil court for $75 million.

As Hill and his co-writer-producer David Giler noticed, this story is intriguing -- the complex cultural background and fallout of a major athlete's rape conviction, the girl's frustration at the hate mail she receives, media hysteria and community protests over the case. Then again, that film has already been made: Barbara Kopple's documentary Fallen Champ considers the cultural production and use of the "monstrous" Mike Tyson, via his trial and conviction. Hill and Giler's movie takes another tack, centered on the guy stuff: not too much introspection, lots of training montages. The political critique, such as it is, has to do with how marginalized, hard-time men make order and icons out of the leftover lot they're dealt.

But that doesn't mean the guys in Undisputed don't fall in lockstep with mainstream values, revering the strongest and the fastest, fearing the low-downest, resenting but also yearning to be the richest, and so on. Iceman proves a useful target for much frustration because he likes himself too much, expecting everyone else to bow down when he shows up. For the most part, they do, including his cellmate Mingo (Wes Studi, who starred, magnificently, in Hill's Geronimo: An American Legend), who schools him, very gently, on how to get along inside.

But one guy, dontcha know, stands up to Iceman. Lifer Monroe Hutchen (Wesley Snipes) has been winning Sweetwater bouts for 10 years (apparently despite the fact that his "trainer" is Fisher Stevens). An ex-California state boxing champion convicted for beating his wife's lover to death with his bare fists, he's gen-pop's beloved and undisputed champion; even the skinheads like him. Sullen and silent, Monroe survives, he says, by "living inside my head." The movie translates this to his building bridges and pagodas out of toothpicks. Rumor has it that he was so Zen-like in the film's first cut that Miramax demanded new scenes to make him more "likeable." (For the record, Snipes objected.)

The result is a routinely schematic opposition: self-described gladiator Iceman versus super-sober Monroe. In fact, it hardly matters once the two meet in the cage at film's end, in a fight arranged by feisty Mafioso and boxing student/historian Mendy Ripstein (Peter Falk). The fight images are stunning: none of that slow motion brutal ballet stuff, just hard-charging, train-rush wallops and collisions. Boxing is an ugly "sport," mainly in its financing. But these guys are beautiful. Maybe they're why Master P signed up, to be part of their brilliance.