With only six months left of his sentence, inmate Frank Leone is transferred from a minimum-security prison to a maximum-security prison by a vindictive warden.
In 1989, Sylvester Stallone’s career was in a bit of a slump. That year, he had two movies released, “Lock Up” and “Tango & Cash” and both flopped. It didn’t help matters when the previous year “Rambo III” came out and bombed. It would be another four years before he had a comeback in the exciting action-thriller “Cliffhanger” but “Lock Up” was unfairly dismissed by critics and audiences alike.
Stallone gives a good performance as Frank Leone, a man who is serving the remaining six months of a five-year jail sentence. He is serving the remainder of his sentence in Norwood, a low-security prison located in Hoboken, New Jersey. One night, he is awoken and forced out of his cell into the back of an armored police truck and driven to Gateway, a maximum-security prison which is run by the ruthless and sadistic Warden Drumgoole (Donald Sutherland), a man Frank crossed some years earlier. He promises Frank that his last six months will be pure hell.
As Frank gets to know some of the inmates, including Dallas (Tom Sizemore), Eclipse (Frank McRae), and First Base (Larry Romano), he is also threatened daily by Chink Weber (Sonny Landham), a cold-blooded, vicious inmate who secretly works for the warden and will stop at nothing to break Frank. When all his attempts fail, he resorts to killing one of Frank’s friends and Frank retaliates, putting Chink in the hospital but he also gets injured in the scuffle. While recovering, an inmate who is getting out the next day informs Frank that when he leaves he will find his girlfriend Melissa (Darlanne Fluegel) and rape her and kill her. This forces Frank to take matters into his own hands.
He requests Dallas to help him escape that night so he can save Melissa but Dallas snitches on him and Drumgoole informs him that an inmate trying to escape will automatically receive ten years to his sentence and that will be more than enough time for him to break Frank. He leaves and his barbaric guards try to beat up Frank but he manages to get the upper hand on them and disappears into the sewers underneath the penitentiary. While he gives the impression to everyone inside the prison that he escaped and broke out, he has alternate plans that involve the warden and a newly-refurbished electric chair where he will force Drumgoole to admit he was set up or he will fry him.
“Lock Up” is your typical ’80s prison thriller where the main protagonist is innocent of a crime and must prove it to the authorities. Stallone is in fine form and you immediately can’t help but side with him because when you discover the reason he’s in prison in the first place is that he beat up some youths who attacked and killed an old man who was a father-figure to him his whole life, you find yourself condoning his actions so technically, he is not a bad guy, just someone who is very human and whose emotions got the better of him. Naturally, they couldn’t make his character a serial killer or pedophile, otherwise, we wouldn’t care about him or his plight.
Donald Sutherland plays his role as the cruel and merciless warden with relish, chewing up all the scenery whenever he appears, propelling you to want to put your fist through your TV screen so as to hurt his smug, conceited face. The few scenes he and Stallone share together are tense, especially the final scene where Frank uses the threat of death by electric chair to get him to confess to setting him up so that he would want to escape with only a few months left on his sentence. In the end, “Lock Up” adds nothing new to the prison genre but it is amusing to see a young Tom Sizemore pre-“Saving Private Ryan” and some of the fight scenes are well-choreographed. If you’re a Stallone fan, check it out for curiosity’s sake, you won’t be disappointed.
Available on 4K Ultra HD™ Combo Pack (plus Blu-ray™ and Digital) and Digital 4K Ultra HD September 10th
