Review: Wedlock/Deadlock

Future-set prison caper yarn has thief Rutger Hauer thrown into slimy warden Stephen Tobolowsky’s prison wherein prisoners are kept in line via collars rigged to explode if they are separated by more than 100 yards from a designated partner. Naturally, no one is supposed to know who their partner is. However, spunky Mimi Rogers claims to have bribed a guard into telling her who her partner is. Guess who that might be? James Remar and Joan Chen play Hauer’s double-crossing partner and lover respectively, Grand L. Bush plays another former associate who is slightly more trustworthy, while Glenn Plummer and Basil Wallace play fellow prisoners, one friendly, the latter anything but. Again, it won’t be hard to guess which is which there if you’re familiar with the actors.

 

Enjoyable 1991 Lewis Teague (the underrated “Cujo”, as well as “The Jewel of the Nile”) TV movie is a sci-fi bent on “The Defiant Ones” with reliable work by Hauer, Tobolowsky (easy to hate), Wallace, and Remar to make up for the amateurish and shrill Chen and the seriously miscast Rogers. Was her pixie cut meant to help seal the deal of her being a prisoner? ‘Coz I still wasn’t buying it. Hauer and Rogers are no Poitier and Curtis, but the film gets the job done for what it is.

 

Good B-grade fun, occasionally clever, and certainly one of Hauer’s best films from post-1989. That last part may not be saying a whole heck of a lot, though. The screenplay is by Broderick Miller, who scripted the subsequent “Deadlock 2” and “Slap Shot 2: Breaking the Ice”.

 

Rating: B-

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