Wedlock (1991)

after a heist gone wrong our hero is thrown into prison, no big deal because he's already hidden all the loot from his cheating partners,, only problem is with this prison is that you are assigned a partner,, and each of you have to wear a collar around you're neck,, but the collar's are filled with explosives,, so when you get so many feet in distance between each other,, both of you're heads get blown clean off.. while in jail he meets up with a woman who says she knows who his partner is,, and she can safely disarm the collars,, also we have a greedy warden who knows about the heist gone wrong and offers our hero a chance at redemption if he will tell the warden where the jewels are,, after breaking out of prison successfully,, our hero is on the trail of the jewels,, along with his new jailbird friend,, together they must find the diamonds, before his ex partners and the law find him.

The actual plot idea is quite good - a high security prison where inmates are kept from leaving by hi-tech collars around their necks. I wonder if the exploding collar idea came from an earlier science fiction action movie "The Running Man" (1987) with Schwarzenegger ? There is some similarity to "The Defiant ones". One scene reminded me of "Speed" . The title is something of a metaphor for our lead character, as he didn't had luck with women in the past.This movie is action/thriller with a rather small science-fiction element ( probably because of the low budget) . The movie definitely suffers from small budget that didn't allow some interesting ideas to be explored ( The cars have bar-codes instead of license plates ) . The movie is supposed to be set in the future , but the world didn't really changed at all . this "future" could very easily be mistaken for 1991, when the movie was made. "Wedlock" suffers from it's made-for-video-status .Despite having impressive cast ( for a B-class movie ) – Rutger Hauer , Joan Chen (Chen and Hauer met earlier in "Salute of the Jugger" ), Mimi Rogers and Stephen Tobolowsky – acting is a weak side of the movie . Why so experienced actors give such bad , cartoonish-like performances I will never know. Stephen Tobolowsky was very unconvincing as the hard nosed prison warden.The action scenes are forgettable and the plot twists are rather painfully obvious. The dialogues are trashy. The relationship between Frank and fellow escapee played by Mimi Rogers is forced and arbitraryThe film looked very promising, but the end result was really bad. I would like to see a remake of this one with better cast and budget. I give it 2/10.

'Sometime in the future' (probably 1997), an electronics whiz gone bad named Frank (Rutger Hauer) was f*cked over by his partners in crime and sent to a revolutionary new prison. The hook of the new prison is that there are no walls or draconian confinement measures, prisoners wander around as they please. But each prisoner wears a bulky electronic collar this explodes if someone attempts to remove it. Furthermore each prisoner is linked to another unknown prisoner in the facility, and if they move more than 100 yards apart *BOOOM!!!*, both collars explode and you can cancel the hat shopping trip. Bad luck I guess if your partner decides suicide is the solution… Of course Frank manages to uncover the identity of his collar-buddy and the two escape, spending an hour or so coming perilously close to breaching the 100 yard boundary and going pop. To complicate matters the prison warden wants Frank for more than escaping, he wants to get his paws on the 25M he and his fellow crims managed to get away with, crims that by the way are back on the scene and want to talk to Frank for themselves for some reason.Hauer actually gets to be a little sarcastic and dare I say salty with his dialogue in this film. Given the fact that it was always going to be a one note straight to VHS flick he hams it up merrily in some scenes, most notably when the warden initially hits him up for the diamonds. Rutger was never really very good at comedy, but at least he tries here.Wedlock is actually quite solidly plotted in the early going. The initial robbery is well thought out and creative, and they obviously spent a bit of time fine tuning the details in the prison where other films might've said 'we thought of the exploding collars, that'll do'.The relationship between Frank and fellow escapee played by Mimi Rogers is forced and arbitrary – as is to be expected in a B film where actual chemistry is less a priority than finding someone they could afford – and the supporting cast of fellow 80s and 90s bitzers only serve to further highlight the low budget nature of the film.Final Rating – 5.5 / 10. Wedlock will definitely not demand a spot in your DVD collection, but 20 years or so since release it still justifies the hour and a half of your time.

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.