One of the most prolific actors of all time, Sylvester Stallone has starred in over a hundred movies, but how do his prison movies rank? Ever since his breakout role as Rocky Balboa in the Rocky franchise, it's seemed that nothing, not even prison, can stop Stallone. Starring in a wide, eclectic range of roles from the high-grossing Rambo movies to a short comedy film by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone (called Your Studio and You), Stallone is a long-beloved figure of American cinema.
Despite a brief critical lull in his career spanning the early 2000s, Stallone has remained the action hero model of American pop culture, alongside his movie rival Arnold Schwarzenegger and more recent action stars such as Jason Statham and Dave Bautista. Stallone's mid-2000s return to success reprised his status as the model example of the action genre star, especially with the release of The Expendables (2010), an ensemble action film that anticipated the rise of star-studded action flicks of the 2010s.
With that in mind, to pick apart every single Stallone action film would be quite the task. Instead, here is a more narrowly focused list of every Stallone prison movie, ranked from worst to best. Granted, while it's technically not every single prison movie with Stallone, these are the eight Stallone films in which prisons play an important role.
The sequel to 2013's much more successful Escape Plan, Escape Plan 2: Hades sees Stallone and Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson reprising their roles from the first film, with Dave Bautista joining the cast as well. As the title suggests, Escape Plan 2 involves a team of specialists trained in rescuing prisoners from otherwise impenetrable prison systems. Indeed, despite being driven by a straightforward, exciting premise, the film's overall poor execution has more than earned its last-place spot on this list. And Stallone would likely agree with this assessment, considering the negative comments on the film that Stallone shared in an Instagram post: "Escape Plan 2 WAS TRULY THE MOST HORRIBLY PRODUCED FILM I have ever had the misfortune to be in..." Yet, despite being a box office flop, Escape Plan 2 helped stoke the budding bromance between Stallone and Bautista that'd continue in the franchise's following sequel.
Slightly better than its predecessor, Escape Plan: The Extractors (or Escape Plan 3) is the third and final installment of the Escape Plan franchise, starring Stallone, Bautista, and 50 Cent. Skipping the theaters altogether and releasing direct-to-video, Escape Plan 3 performed a little better among critics than Escape Plan 2 with a similar plot focusing on a team of prison breaking experts once again led by Sylvester Stallone as Ray Breslin. Perhaps realizing the mess they were making with the second Escape Plan, the franchise's producers looked to cast actors with mixed martial arts experience to ramp up the action in Escape Plan 3. Endearingly, the most earnest aspect of this film is the connection between Stallone and Bautista, both onscreen and off, as Bautista admitted that he only joined Escape Plan role to work with the legendary Stallone.
Directed by John Flynn, Lock Up is a prison action film starring Stallone as the model prisoner Frank Leone and Donald Sutherland as the cruel prison warden Drumgoole. With Leone nearing the end of his prison term, Drumgoole abruptly and forcibly places Leone under maximum security as retaliation for Leone previously informing the press about Drumgoole's excessive mistreatment of his prisoners. Left with no other option, Leone has to find a way to reveal Drumgoole's unethical, deceptive practices or face a lifetime imprisoned under the warden's torturous thumb. Initially grossing $22.1 million on a $24 million budget, Lock Up performed poorly both critically and financially. Though, as is common with Stallone flicks, audience reception generally favored Lock Up as a fairly decent action film.
Despite poor critical reception during its initial release, the original Judge Dredd has achieved cult classic status over time, with Giant Freakin' Robot claiming Judge Dredd as "one of the best achievements of the 90s." Based on the comic book character of the same name, Judge Dredd takes place in a dark, dystopic future (the year 2080, to be exact) in the crime-infested metropolis of Mega-City One. Performing the combined roles of judge, jury, and executioner all in one, Judge Joseph Dredd, played by Stallone, is framed for murder by his psychotic brother Rico, landing the judge as a prisoner for life in a harsh penal colony that he must escape to continue enacting justice on ne'er-do-wells. With a campy, flashy, fascistic aesthetic, Judge Dredd, for many, falls under the "so bad it's good" category of Stallone's filmography, garnering enough interest to have warranted a reboot with 2012's Dredd, starring Karl Urban in the lead role.
The first film to pair Stallone and Schwarzenegger as co-stars, Escape Plan initiated the Escape Plan franchise that'd go on to produce two far inferior sequels, as listed above. Kicking off the Escape Plan trilogy, the first Escape Plan introduces Stallone's Ray Breslin, a lawyer turned prison security tester, and his crew of fellow escape artists that includes Schwarzenegger's Emil Rottmayer, who conveniently happens to be an incarcerated security expert. With a marketing campaign that predominantly appealed to gamers, the original Escape Plan does have a video game feel, signaling a shift in action fan sensibilities in the 2010s' early years. While some critics felt the lead roles would've been better suited for the likes of Chuck Norris or Jean-Claude Van Damme, many fans, gamers, and cinephiles were eager to see Stallone and Schwarzenegger finally team up for once.
Victory, or Escape to Victory, is a unique sports war drama directed by John Huston and starring Sylvester Stallone and Michael Caine. Set in a German Nazi POW camp, Victory follows the events leading up to a soccer match between Nazi soldiers and the captive Allies, who are secretly organizing an escape from the camp. The "most unusual battle of the war," the soccer match would pit the "Third Reich's finest" against a ragged group of POWs, as an opportunity for the WWII Nazis to unfairly propagandize their athletic (and eugenic) superiority over their enemies. As the somewhat high-stakes version of The Longest Yard, Victory mixes the excitement of an underdog sports movie with the cerebral thrills of a prison break flick, while smartly casting Stallone as a sentimental-yet-heroic jock.
A buddy cop action movie co-starring Stallone and Kurt Russell, Tango & Cash follows odd-couple partners and LAPD narcotics experts, Tango (Stallone) and Cash (Russell), who have to put aside their differences to devise an escape plan after being wrongfully imprisoned for murdering an FBI agent. In what feels like one of Stallone's more unintentionally iconic roles, thanks almost exclusively to the costume decision to throw glasses on his meaty head, Tango is a stern, four-eyed lieutenant unwittingly partnered with Russell's goofy, genial, smart-mouthed Cash, a duo whose cinematic chemistry originates from their total lack of fictional chemistry, personality-wise. An endearingly corny from the innocent days before internet irony seeped into the pop-culture mainstream, Tango & Cash has since been reappraised as a fan favorite of Stallone's filmography.
A surprisingly thoughtful and provocative sci-fi action flick, 1993's Demolition Man co-stars Stallone and Wesley Snipes as cop and criminal, respectively, in a futuristic, dystopian L.A. where criminals are sentenced to a frozen state of incarceration called cryo-prison After escaping cryo-prison with a lethal set of computer-programmed abilities, Snipes' Simon Phoenix goes on a killing spree, provoking Stallone's John Spartan out of frozen retirement. To catch the killer, Spartan teams up with Sandra Bullock's charming-yet-professional Lenina Huxley, a name that hints at Demolition Man's literary inspiration, Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World. Again, despite negative critical reception, including a Golden Raspberry Award nomination for Worst Supporting Actress (Bullock), Demolition Man has undeniable and seemingly unintentional charisma, thanks in large part to the oddly effective chemistry between Sylvester Stallone, Snipes, and Bullock.
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