4 Reasons why Lock Up is better than The Shawshank Redemption

1) Hobbies

In The Shawshank Redemption, Dufresne collects rocks off the ground and recruits others to do the same.  Then he takes them to his cell and moulds them with a special rock polishing paper.  In Lock Up, you wouldn’t find Leone doing some sissy shit like that.  Instead of finding and polishing rocks, Leone is too busy restoring a First Generation Ford Mustang and polishing that instead.

2) Disputes

In the Shawshank Redemption, mumbling loser Dufresne is attacked and beaten to a pulp by a rapist homosexual. Dufresne tries to intimidate the faggot out of assaulting him by reciting some information he read in a textbook.  This isn’t how Clint Eastwood handled it in Escape from Alcatraz, when he beat a similar foe half to death for looking crooked at him in the showers.  But anyway, in Lock Up, Stallone has scarier foes.  Like Sonny Landham.  Instead of reasoning with Landham or declaring medical factoids, Stallone bursts through a door and attacks and beats Landham with a 5kg dumbbell.

3)  Breakout

In both movies, Dufresne and Leone are locked up and prove their innocence in bust outs that expose the Wardens.  In The Shawshank redemption, Dufresne breaks out after a long, painstaking, beaten-up tunnel job.  A process that lasts an interminable 16 years and ends up crawling through 500 yards of raw shit.  In Lock Up, Stallone doesn’t need to.  Instead, Stallone fights his way through a unit of riot guards in a scuffle that leaves two dead.  Then runs through rooftops with alarms blaring and attack dogs howling.  And it worked –  Stallone is home in time for Christmas to see his wife.  Dufresne’s wife is dead by the opening credits.

4) Dealing with the Warden

In both Lock Up (1989) and The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Leone and Dufresne are a pair of wronged inmates at odds with their Wardens.  Both Wardens throw each man in the hole.  Both are keeping them in prison illegally.  Dufresne deals with the situation by stitching up his Warden, all the while being his little book keeper for 16 years.  That kind of shit wouldn’t fly with Leone.  In Lock Up, Leone doesn’t painstakingly stitch up his opponent.  Instead, he ties him to a chair and threatens to electrocute him.  Afterwards, he’s released in no time to the nodding approval of screws who let him out at the gate.  If The Shawshank Redemption had Leone in it, the Warden would’ve been exposed within 6 months.  If it had Manny from Runaway Train in it, he’d have been dead within 6 days!