Lock Up (1989)
Columbia DVD (region 4)
d. John Flynn; pr. Lawrence Gordon, Charles Gordon; scr. Richard Smith, Jeb Stuart, Henre Rosenbaum; ph. Donald E. Thorin; m. Bill Conti; ed. Don Brochu, Robert A. Ferretti, Michael N. Knue, Barry B. Leirer; cast. Sylvester Stallone, Donald Sutherland, John Amos, Tom Sizemore, Sonny Landhamn, Frank McRae, Darlanne Fluegel (115 mins)
The prison film has often been used for incisive portraits of the extremes of humanity, balancing on the one hand the imperative to punish offenders and on the other the need to rehabilitate them. Prisoners are thus often under the yoke of brutal, sadistic guards who intend to rob them of their dignity, or have the benefit of caring guards who seek to restore the prisoners’ humanity. Most often it is a mixture of both. Whilst such high-profile prison films as Brubaker, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile and The Last Castle are all solemn, purposeful films with a clear vision of the ambiguities of human nature and the redemptive possibility of the human spirit, there exist on the other side of that spectrum, certain so-called “exploitation” films that lack such a context and frequently wallow in sadism, sexual abuse and brutality. Most often these are women-in-prison films (with much nudity), as if somehow that subject is inherently sensationalistic. Those exploitative prison films that deal with male convicts frequently have the same emphasis on brash sadism (though not nudity), but the sense of triumph within them is not redemptive or reformatory, instead amounting to a sad and even ambiguous validation of the use of brutality to combat brutality. Lock Up falls rather uncomfortably between the two stools, seeking reconciliation in the end in the action perhaps expected of its star’s image.
Lock Up tells the story of a peaceable criminal (Sylvester Stallone), a former mechanic now serving in a progressive modern prison. With only six months left on his sentence, he seems a model prisoner and is even allowed outside of the prison on a day trip. One night though, for no apparent reason, he is brutally taken away and transferred to another prison, this one an ill-kept, hellish and repressive institution: a throwback to the fire and brimstone retribution of a pre-liberalist era. The warden of this jail (Donald Sutherland) is a determined sadist who has a personal score to settle with Stallone. It seems that Stallone once escaped from a prison run by Sutherland and that in response, Sutherland was disciplined and re-assigned to what is supposedly the worst prison in the system. In turn, he has had Stallone transferred to this maximum security facility in order to break his spirit and exact a protracted revenge. As Stallone makes friends with some of the other cons who work in the motor shop, Sutherland pressures the guards (and another convict) to push Stallone as much as they can. However, when Stallone refuses to be broken, Sutherland seeks to press his resolute buttons by targeting his newfound friends and eventually by an even more hideous plan – to assault the one person who seems to mean the most to him. When Stallone finds this out, even he may have trouble restraining himself. read more