John Flynn is an intriguing director, capable of provocative studies of human aberration in a thrilling urban context (with Rolling Thunder, Best Seller and even the Steven Seagal film Out for Justice). As the prison setting here allows for a variation in such aberrant machismo, Flynn seeks to so contextualize human exploitation in male pathology. The majority of the guards are thus brutal thugs intent to demoralize and humiliate the prisoners, the bulk of whom in turn seem to be continuously at their worst. It is here that Flynn’s agenda (such as there is of it) emerges: that if men (even criminals) are continuously brutalized, demoralized and treated as less than human, then they will in effect become less than human in their own minds and behave accordingly, they will become violently animalistic. For an exploitation flick, this is handled with patience and restraint. Ironically, Stallone is initially treated as a heroic figure through much of the film because of his refusal to give into the violent capacity that rests within him. Because he will not respond to such provocation he retains his dignity, and the centre-piece of the film, where Stallone and his friends restore an old car to pristine condition, is a gesture of defiance, however fleeting it may be. This being a Stallone film, however, and one not long after the Rambo cycle, the actor has a persona to live up to and the course of the film is thus perhaps inevitable.
Rather than break with the expectations of a Stallone film, the film in effect uses these to further explore masculine limits of tolerance and what men are capable of doing once those limits are breached. Hence, humanity can take only so much provocation and torment (and masculinity just so much masochism) before it will explode. Prison is the ultimate test to that limit, the nadir of sado-masochistic machismo – Darwinist masculinity. Interestingly enough though, Stallone and Sutherland are compared and contrasted in terms of their approach to the responsibility of lives in their charge. Whilst Sutherland uses brutality to keep the prison population in line, humiliate them and rob them of their right to self-determination, Stallone, on the other hand, with a kind of working man’s liberal humanism tries to restore hope and dignity to a young prisoner who has almost surrendered to the institution’s dehumanization. An important subtext in the film concerns the battle between Sutherland and Stallone for this man’s fate. Stallone in effect becomes a substitute father to the man that ugly authoritarian Sutherland thinks nothing of. However, Sutherland senses that the way to get to Stallone is to attack these patriarchal feelings and destroy the surrogate prison family where Stallone is a rival patriarch: for Flynn thus, it is this pathologically macho authoritarianism that undermines the due force of patriarchal responsibility. read more