People are voting emotionally.

Absolutely amazing

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

I first saw the start of this on TV as an 11 year old in 1995 and unfortunately did not get the chance to finish it. I didn't see it again on TV nor was I able to locate it on home video. Fast forward 13 years later to 2008, I managed to locate a rare copy of this on DVD and was very eager to watch this movie. By the end, I was extremely disappointed at how atrocious the movie was. The entire movie resembled something that was aimed towards children under 13 years. The film looked very promising, but the end result was really bad. The film felt very derivative and plot ideas thrown in were extremely lame. Rutger Hauer of Blade Runner and The Hitcher fame deserved a lot better, as does Mimi Rogers (Tom Cruise's ex-wife), Joan Chen (On Deadly Ground) and James Remar (48 Hrs.). Stephen Tobolowsky (Ned Ryerson from Groundhog Day) was very unconvincing as the hard nosed prison warden.The whole movie resembled a live action cartoon filled with very lame ideas. A total waste of a movie.1/10.

Rutger Hauer can't carry a film as a leading man, he just can't; and he gets found out and looks utterly ridiculous at times. That he was doing films of this type only bears fruit to my statement, but that is not to say he hasn't been in fun action films, because he has, and this one has its moments......just.An interesting premise is what holds the film together, it is pure sci-fi hokum, and it is the kind of plot that keeps you interested even tho you really know what the outcome is going to be. A series of decent set pieces entertain, and there are little slices of humour to cement the daftness unfolding. The supporting cast fare no better than Hauer with Mimi Rogers hopelessly miscast as the tough Female lead, tho for the red blooded Male it has to be said she has one of the finest bottoms in cinema!! Surprisingly wasted is the talent of Stephen Tobolowsky, whilst James Remar is playing to his type as the grizzly baddie.All in all it just about rates average, but Blade Runner and The Hitcher seem a million miles away now. 5/10

Set "sometime in the future" the main character Frank (Rutger Hauer) gets sent into a new kind of prison. Everybody in the prison has a necklace, which is linked with another person's necklace. (Of course you don't know who this other person is.) If you get too far away from the person you're linked with both of your necklaces will explode. This is of course to prevent people from escaping. Compared to if the necklace was just linked to a certain spot inside the prison, the idea of linking the necklace to another person adds another dimension to it. You might be willing to risk your own life trying to escape, but do you really want to risk another person's life at the same time? Such a prison will not be set in the US in the present time of course. It would be highly controversial. That's why the believability of the plot relies on this being set in sometime the future, when views on moral have changed enough so that such a prison will become plausible. The problem here is that this "future" could very easily be mistaken for 1991, when the movie was made. This is a huge problem for me as I just don't believe that such a prison will exist in the US in the near future. I would have really wanted them to put more effort/resources into making it seem more futuristic. I guess this was a budgetary decision.Even if you don't care about the plot being plausible, this movie has little to offer compared to other semi-low-budget movies of the genre. The action sequences and acting efforts are pretty average, and the script follows the Hollywood formula quite well, making any plot twists obvious. I'm a bit disappointed because it actually seemed like a pretty cool idea for an early '90s action movie. Maybe I'm a little nice with the grade 4/10, but I didn't want to be too harsh when the basic idea is actually good. I might be interested in a remake with a bit higher budget so they can set it further into the future.I'd recommend this only for the die hard 1980s and early '90s action movie fans.

Rutger Hauer's movies tend to be better than one would expect from genre pieces, often because of a special feel for atmosphere and quirk. Deadlock was one of the first movies to feature the newer, heavier Hauer, who uses his heft to the advantage of his characterization, creating a slightly ridiculous figure (who goes from a ludicrous pony-tail for his duel-to-the-death to a sort of swami outfit to something that looks like it ought to be upholstering a chair in a whorehouse) who is not quite up to the circumstances he finds himself in, but perseveres anyway. Smart, but hardly a criminal mastermind, his Frank is teamed with an especially charming Mimi Rogers. Hardly surprising that they go from insults to clinches, but it is appealing that the main thing keeping them apart (their abysmal track records in romance) is what, thanks to empathy, helps bridge the differences between them. The sci-fi gimmick here is really beside the point. What counts is the presence of several skillful actors and their deftly drawn characters. Stephen Tobolowsky is especially amusing, and he has the movie's best line: "You nonconformists are all alike."