Nobody has perfected the art of rising, falling, and reinvention like Sylvester Stallone. Despite building himself from obscurity as the lovable Rocky Balboa, it’s the falling that Stallone thrives in. It’s those underdogs like Rocky, John Rambo, or Freddy Heflin in Copland who Stallone resonates with the most. As Rocky and Rambo became larger-than-life icons side-by-side with their star, the ability to relate to them became a struggle. We don’t often look to roided out freaks of nature as reflections of ourselves, but as fun as it is to see Arnold or Dolph crack skulls, Stallone’s superpower is those sad sack, puppy dog eyes. You can’t help but see a bit of yourself in this schlub. It’s almost as if you just put on a little bit of muscle, you, too, might be able to save the day. Or go down swinging.
By 1989, Stallone had largely given up on any pretense of being the everyman. Even when squaring off against the perfect specimen, Dolph Lundgren in Rocky IV, the sense of any real danger was long gone. Rambo was no longer the disassociating PTSD victim trying to make sense of it all. In the Reagan 80s, he was a globetrotting merc mindlessly gunning down foreign boogeymen. Don’t be mistaken, Sly’s movies in this period were indisputable bangers, Cobra’s an action masterpiece, but the bloat was starting to set in. It wouldn’t happen for another half-decade or so but Stallone’s first fall was imminent. Taking a bird’s eye view of his career, one almost wonders if he was sensing it too, because sandwiched in between these high-octane, muscled-up schlock is John Flynn’s Lock Up.
Lock Up reads like a typical Stallone action joint. Model prisoner Frank Leone is six months from being released when, in the middle of the night, he’s violently transferred to a supermax prison run by the fascistic Warden Drumgoole (Donald Sutherland). Stemming from a shared history between the two (Leone escaped Drumgoole’s previous prison and left him in disgrace), the Warden vows to make Leone’s final six months a living hell. You’d be forgiven for assuming Stallone would spend the next 90 minutes fighting his way through goons and guards with a setup like that. With a hulking Sonny Landham (Billy in Predator) threatening to crack his skull at every turn, the threat of tipping into mayhem is omnipresent. Lock Up, however, is a shockingly quiet, often sweet film that feels wholly at odds with Stallone’s cultural presence as the 80s rolled into the 90s.
Frank is a family man, a man of honor and despite being built like a brick shithouse, he’s not too keen on getting into scraps. More akin to Stallone’s finest creation, Rocky, Frank prefers to keep it unassuming. Nose to the grindstone, he does what he needs to do to get by. Even when his last six months in the clink are thrown into disarray and he’s given what Drumgoole calls a “guided tour” of hell, he has no desire to rock the boat. Of course, when he’s at wits’ end, he explodes into violence, but even still, this isn’t the gun-toting, by any means necessary, justice Stallone the world had become accustomed to. His brand of vengeance isn’t through killing, not really. Marion Cobretti would’ve taken Drumgoole’s head clean off and looked great doing it. Frank, via a much softer Stallone, only wants to get into Drumgoole’s head. To let him know he’s won. What makes their final confrontation so jarring, Frank screaming through saliva, threatening to pull the lever on the electric chair and burn Drumgoole alive, is that his performance has completely erased our presupposed idea of Stallone. Years and years of violence should’ve prepared us for a Stallone who has no qualms about roasting this pencil-pushing psychopath to a crisp. It’s remarkable, then, that over the previous 90 minutes, Stallone buries all of that and convinces you that he’s a man incapable of this kind of horror. You’ve become so attached to kindly, goodhearted Frank that even though he’s been pushed to his limit through unspeakable torture in this hellhole, you can’t bear seeing him become the monster Drumgoole says he is. So much so that it’s a relief when it’s all revealed as a bluff to get a confession of guilt and put this sadist behind bars.
While Stallone is doing, to that point, some of the best work of his career, a lion’s share of what makes this little curio standout is director John Flynn. Most famous for Out for Justice (One of Steven Seagal’s finest outings), Flynn is the kind of steady hand that could plug right into genre-adjacent fare and give it the gravitas it might miss elsewhere. With a litany of punchy titles to his name, like Scam or Protector, you always knew what you were getting with a Flynn picture superficially. It’s that earthy grit he imbues that you’d never expect diving in. Think of his best work, Rolling Thunder. At first glance, it’s nothing more than a revenge thriller, but in tandem with a dynamite Paul Schrader script, Flynn delivers a devastating and bleak look at a post-Vietnam America where disillusionment was the only game in town. The only way to “win” is to sink lower than the guy with a gun to your head. That’s Schrader’s bread and butter, but Flynn is of a similar ilk. Perhaps a more meat-and-potatoes ilk, but he’s equally fascinated by men of code, forced into untenable situations, and seeing how far he can dip them into the mud before breaking.
Stallone’s Frank Leone is that man with a code, and it takes everything in him not to break it. Flynn puts him through the ringer to the point that it would’ve been comical if it weren’t so sad. (Credit those puppy dog eyes on Stallone for always pulling at our heartstrings.) If anything is holding Lock Up back, it might just be this bizarre juxtaposition. By ‘89, the bleak existentialism Flynn was trading in with Thunder or 1973’s terrific The Outfit was far out of fashion. Audiences weren’t looking for moral ambiguity, they wanted hulking heroes doling out swift, clear-headed justice. Lock Up attempts to make bold statements about the fallacy of prison as rehabilitation, but every time it walks up to the line, it pulls back. Drumgoole’s guards are a pack of sadistic brutes, beating Frank at every turn and even threatening to rape his wife. But just as you’re starting to think we’re getting a statement on corruption from the top down, John Amos’s guard has a change of heart, and it turns out there were just a few bad apples.
That’s the trouble with attempting a more muted Stallone picture in the middle of his monster heights. Even when you can feel him trying to pull it back, and as Flynn weaves a subversive web, it was never going to escape the blunt force of its period. Tinkly score over memories of his wife, a cutesy montage of Sly and the jailhouse boys rebuilding a car, and a mentorship struck up with a younger prisoner. All torn apart at the expense of Frank’s psyche. Our underdog hero suffers so much devastation that there’s no reason he shouldn’t pull the lever and make Drumgoole ride the lightning. In 1974, that’s how Flynn ends this. In 1989? Not a chance. So what you’re left with is a Frankenstein’d prison picture that alternates between brutality and sentimentality, never quite finding the middle. Never letting Frank learn much about the kind of man he is. Because the man he was going in is the same man that comes out: a Goddamn Hero.
None of this is to say Lock Up doesn’t work. Far from it. It's still a John Flynn prison picture starring Sylvester Stallone. We only got one of those, and the one we got is wildly entertaining but never dares to truly ask the tough questions, only lightly tease them. Perhaps that was enough because while Stallone enjoyed that next half decade of gargantuan success, the fall was coming. Rocky V was met with series’ worst reviews, a string of awful comedies followed, and though Cliffhanger and Demolition Man offered major bright spots, Stallone felt cooked. For over ten years, he toiled in the dregs until he was forced to punch his way back to the top with Rocky Balboa. The lone bright spot in those ten years? 1997’s Copland. Featuring a career-best performance from our lovable brute (nothing to sneeze at when his costars are De Niro and Keitel), Copland is a twisting tale of police corruption where the only one not on the take is the quiet, unassuming chief of a small town’s police force, played by Sly. Nabbing him rave reviews, not just for his performance but for his willingness to explore parts of his persona we hadn’t seen, Copland feels unlike anything he’d been in until that point. That is, of course, if you let a gem like Lock Up slip through the sands of time. Make no mistake, the former is far better than the latter. Still, it’s an undeniable treat to see an on-top-of-the-world Stallone taking stock of his career, trying on the everyman shoes Rocky and Rambo had long since traded in and acting his enlarged heart out. Lock Up can’t help but be a product of its star’s moment, but it’s a fascinating object from a director with an inimitable point of view. If nothing else, seeing Sly rally the troops in the muddiest game of football ever played while Sonny Landham tries to knock his head off is a hell of a good time.
-Brandon Streussnig