Metacritic reviews

For torture and violence freaks, every clank and thud is duly and hyperbolically registered.

A hard-boiled version of Rocky, with enough anti-Balboa brutality to keep our interest.

The film is a sort of prison fantasy, in which all the most popular boys in the cellblock have a high time together, smoking cigarettes, working on cars and spraying each other with paint guns...All the while you're thinking, "What is this, ancient Greece?"

Put the whole movie down to cartoonery...This is a drive-in theater battle of wills between the forces of evil and the forces of good.

Lock Up is made in the same, simplistic vein as most other Sylvester Stallone pics - putting him, the blue-collar protagonist, against the odds over which he ultimately prevails.

With nothing in the way of performance to cling to, the audience is left to marvel at the mounting inanity of each scene.