Lock Up
By Peter John Gardner
Prison isn't such a bad place to be. In the world of "Lock Up", if you're in the "normal" prison that Sly is being held in at the beginning of the filmyou can leave on the weekends if you want and bring back cigarettes and other treats for your fellow inmates. If you're serving hard time in a maximum security prison, you're still allowed to work on vintage cars (the movie never explains why there's a garage with vintage automobiles in a PRISON) without any kind of supervision and granted access to flammable subtances and tools that could easily be used as weapons.
Lock Up tells the story of Frank Leone, a man who is quietly serving out the remainder of his sentence when he is moved into a different prison with an ex-warden of his with an axe to grind. Leone made the ex-warden (played by Donald Sutherland) look like an ass, so now the tables have turned, and it's now time for payback.
Too bad for Sutherland; they fucked with the wrong Italian.
Watching this, you won't feel any suspense. In this film, the supposedly hardcore prison seems pretty damn tame compared to other movie prisons and looks like Disneyworld compared to real prison. There may be mandatory lockdowns, some beatings by guards here and there, and a brutal delousing, but that's about it. These guys seem to spend more time outside of their cells than inside. They work on cars at leisure and play football outside unsupervised. Some of the inmates try to rough up Stallone, but you won't care because Stallone is cut like a bodybuilder in this movie. I never thought I'd say something like this, but this movie needs a good rape scene. Otherwise, the inmates and warden don't seem like any threat at all.
There's not much to be gained from this movie. It deserves its place in Wal-Mart's five dollar bin. A better movie would've shown me the horrors of prison, and my lesson learned would've been something about how I'll never break the law again because I wouldn't want to end up in a prison like Lock Up. Instead, I vow to stay out of trouble from now on only because I don't want to be forced to work on cars or play football. I really don't like doing either one of those activities.
