Delayed Reaction: Lock Up

What I Guessed It Was About: I imagined it was the prequel to the recent Stallone classic Escape Plan. This is the prison escape that makes him famous enough to be called in for the follow up.

How I Came Into It: That title + Stallone says all I really needed to know. After a little research, I realize that that's all anyone knew going into this. It was made in a small window of free time that Stallone had. He found the director, got a bad script rewritten, and basically shot the movie as that script was being completed. This is one of those Razzie-level movies that Stallone became famous for.

Why I Saw It: (Club 50) I cannot think of a movie that has been so thoroughly made worse by a movie that came out after it than this was by The Shawshank Redemption. You can take almost every beat of this story and find an example of it being done better in Shawshank. It's rare to find something that makes me appreciate a movie as good as Shawshank even more. Lock Up is a blessing.

Why I Wish I Hadn't: This is an awful movie. Or, more accurate: this is an awful script that took down the rest of the movie with it. Stallone is too saintly. Donald Sutherland is too villainous. The movie can't figure out whether it's taking the prison setting seriously or not. One specific thing that I found distracting, and I couldn't tell if it was due to the TV edit or something, was the scene fades. It kept fading to black and making me think it was going to commercial and then not doing so. In a good movie, I wouldn't even notice it. In something this bad, it was yet another annoyance.

Verdict (?): Strongly Don't Recommend