Movie Review: 'Lock Up' Turns 30

30 years later, Lock Up is one of those almost entirely forgotten vanity movies of the 1980’s. The film stars Sylvester Stallone in what amounts to what Stallone thinks is a prestige movie. He legit believed in 1989 that Lock Up was the movie that would give him the credibility and legitimacy as an actor he so desperately craved. To his credit, he does give the role his all but the movie is not remotely prestigious or credible.

Lock Up stars Sylvester Stallone as Frank Leone, a prisoner at a low security prison in New Jersey. How low security is this prison? Frank gets out on weekends so he can spend time with his girlfriend, Melissa (Darlanne Fluegel). While he’s actually in jail, he gets to spend his time working on cars and bantering with his car guy prison buddies. Things for Frank, however, are about to go from low security to high security when he’s kidnapped.

Frank is mere weeks away from his release but finds himself hijacked from his low security confinement to a maximum security prison where the Warden, Drumgoole (Donald Sutherland), holds a personal grudge against him. Years earlier, Frank managed to escape from Drumgoole’s previous prison and Drumgoole paid the price by being busted down to the warden of the low rent supermax where he now holds Frank hostage.

To cope with his situation, Frank befriends Dallas (Michael Madsen), First Base (Larry Romano), and Eclipse (Frank McRae) and the group begins work in the prison garage. They work on restoring an old car together. This goes well until Drumgoole has the car destroyed by the other inmates, led by Drumgoole’s top lackey, Chink Weber (Sonny Landham). Chink sets out to destroy Frank with the intent of getting him to do something drastic that will extend Frank’s sentence.

Frank and Chink fight. Frank is thrown into solitary confinement. Frank is tortured with midnight wakeup calls, being forced to stand for hours on end, denied rest and water, all with the aim of breaking him for… reasons. Lock Up is big on creating Job-ian obstacles for Frank, put in place by Sutherland’s mustachio twirling baddie, but there are few ideas beyond the toney, awards baiting suffering of star Sylvester Stallone.

Lock Up was directed by the late John Flynn, best known for being a UCLA classmate of Roots author Alex Haley. Flynn directs Lock Up with the kind of mediocre professionalism that is at times like this more offensive than straight ahead bad direction. In many ways I would prefer Lock Up were entirely incompetent rather than being so remarkably uninteresting. Flynn’s workaday approach fails to give life to the campy aspects of Lock Up that might make the film more memorable than even if the movie had been good.

Donald Sutherland is the only actor who appears to understand what movie he is making. Sutherland is goofing on the whole movie with his sneering grin and scenery chewing. Sutherland relishes the lame, pulpy melodramatics. If the movie had more of Sutherland’s bizarre, over the top energy, Lock Up might not be so dimwittedly adequate, it might have edged toward the kind of camp an audience could enjoy poking fun at.

Sylvester Stallone is typically grim and self-serious in Lock Up. Stallone believes he’s making an Academy Award level effort and his dedication to this forgettable, pedestrian effort is rather sad and poignant. I feel bad that Stallone appears to believe he is making something worthy of such effort when he is actually making Lock Up, a dreadfully mundane piece of prison melodrama modeled on the biblical story of Job crossed with The Shawshank Redemption.

Lock Up was released August 4th of 1989 to bad reviews from critics and indifference from audiences who made the film one of Stallone’s most notable failures. Lock Up grossed $22 million off of a $24 million production budget.

This was a significant fall from Rambo 3 which grossed more than $100 million just one year before the release of Lock Up. The failure of Lock Up was the first chink in the box office armor for Stallone and the beginning of his long, slow descent into the B-Movie circuit where he languishes, awaiting the release of Rambo 5 to try and raise his star power one more time.