Lock Up (1989)

Lock Up arrives from 1989, a year when a prison picture could still concern itself entirely with a man, a warden, and a car. Sylvester Stallone plays Frank Leone, a Hoboken mechanic finishing a sentence in minimum security until Donald Sutherland's Warden Drumgoole has him dragged to Gateway, a maximum-security facility assembled from fog, barbed wire, and grudges. The grievance is personal and petty. Leone once embarrassed the warden in the press. The rest of the running time is a study in institutional cruelty, a rebuilt Mustang, and a man refusing to snap.

For our purposes, the film offers no purchase for modern cultural analysis. John Amos, Frank McRae, and William Allen Young occupy substantial roles, and the script never remarks upon the fact. They are men in a prison because the story needs men in a prison. Darlanne Fluegel's Melissa exists to be threatened and then embraced at the gate. No character wrestles with identity. No subplot carries a message. The environment goes unmentioned, the body is never discussed as a political object, and the mind is simply a thing to be broken by isolation. The villain is a warden, not an economy, so whatever resentment the film generates stays personal and stays small.

What remains is craft of a modest, unfashionable sort. The car gets destroyed. The friend dies in the gym. The hero straps the warden into an electric chair and pulls a switch wired to nothing. It is a revenge thriller that trusts its own machinery and never pauses to instruct us. Critics at the time were unimpressed, the box office fell short of the budget, and the Razzie voters came calling. Stallone later conceded that the whole enterprise lacked maturity. He was correct. The absence of sermonizing is the least of its problems and, for our ledger, the most notable feature.