I haven’t watched all of Sylvester Stallone’s films for the blog, but of all of them, Lock Up is arguably thee worst one that I’ve watched to date. It’s horribly done, underuses Donald Sutherland, which is arguably a crime, and despite shooting on location in an actual prison, nothing works.

Stallone’s character says that three weeks can feel like three years, and I think that same axiom could be applied to watching this film.

Stallone is Frank. He’s in a minimum security prison, and only has a few minutes left on his sentence. He’s looking forward to getting back to Melissa (Darlanne Fluegel) and earning an honest living, and starting a new life.

Unfortunately, fate has other plans. He’s woken in the middle of the night, by Meissner (the ever cool John Amos) and moved to a maximum security prison run by Drumgoole (Sutherland), and he plans to break Frank once and for all. It seems at some point in the past Frank publicly humiliated Drumgoole, and this will be his revenge.

He’s thrown in with the worst of the worst… hey there’s Sonny Landham (as Chink) and if you keep your eyes open you’ll see Danny Trejo.

He tries to get by, he pals around with Eclipse (the always wonderful Frank McCrae) and Dallas (Tom Sizemore in his first big film). But things are brutal and rough, but you just can’t get into it because it’s so poorly constructed.

Things go worse and worse for Frank. He’s beaten, almost broken, and when someone threatens to go after Melissa when they get out the next day, Frank is intent to break out. But you know it’s not going to be that easy.

It does have a pretty solid score by Bill Conti. Throw Sizemore in there, and Sutherland when he shows up, you at least have those things to look forward to.

I’ll give the film credit, it does try to be grittier than Stallone’s other films of the time but its execution isn’t what it could have been. Part of it is because you know that no matter how bad and dark it gets for Frank, how brutal the guards are, how violent, they’re going to get their comeuppance, so the stakes are kind of non-existent. Frank as Stallone, will be fine.

And justice, at least in the terms of this silly story, will be served in its way.

I get that Sutherland wouldn’t have been able to physically square off against Stallone, but his presence needed to be seen and felt more through the film. And the climax, well that’s just problematic in a number of ways, Drumgoole confessing under duress, and everything Frank did leading up to it…

But hey, Hollywood ending right? And speaking of endings… ugh, a ridiculous power ballad by Jimi Jameson called Ever Since the World Began closes the film out… I’m done.