Death Warrant is an OK-ish movie from early in Jean-Claude Van Damme‘s career.
Supporting cast includes Paulo Tocha from Bloodsport two years prior. He also appeared a few years later in another Van Damme prison movie called In Hell.
In this movie, Van Damme plays an undercover cop, who enters a prison where a lot of people are mysteriously dying. He’s on a mission to get to the bottom of it – to find out who is killing who and why – and of course to put an end to it. But everything turns to sheet when the guards pin someone else’s murder on him, then bring in his nemesis from the outside world to torture him.
It’s excessively uncomfortable on multiple occasions and for this reason I rate it barely OK. Let’s call it So-So. It’s got its strengths and its weaknesses – it’s got plenty of the good stuff you’d expect from any Van Damme movie, but when I set out to watch a Van Damme movie I don’t really want to be watching the kind of extended uncomfortable scenes that this movie has in several places, including repeated graphic depictions of Van Damme’s nemesis ‘the Sandman’ slowly embedding the tip of his knife into Van Damme’s abdomen as Van Damme gasps in agony. This stuff should have been condensed and made less explicit too.