Lockout is a non-sensical video game-esque sci-fi actioner that appears to have been written in a matter of hours, filmed over a couple of days and glossed up in a month’s worth of post-production. This is, quite simply, not a very good movie. Yet, somehow, Guy Pearce playing the sardonic hero with all the good lines, makes everything seem as if it’s not so bad. He’s unable to save the film to the point you can look passed the obvious dialogue and overcooked plot, but if I were to catch this on television one night I probably wouldn’t change the channel.
At least, not right away.
Clearly inspired by John Carpenter’s Escape from New York as well as borrowing a significant plot element from its L.A.-set sequel, the film takes place in the year 2079. It begins with its hero, Snow (played by Guy Pearce) — one name is much cooler than two in this sort of film — getting beaten to a pulp by a government agent while responding to each blow with an insouciant wisecrack.
It seems that Snow, a former agent himself, has been falsely accused of a crime and is about to be sent off to begin a 30-year sentence at MS-1, a maximum-security prison in outer space. But when the hundreds of convicts suddenly wake up from their cryogenic state and take hostages, including the president’s daughter Emilie, Snow is offered his freedom in return for a solo rescue mission.
There are more complicated aspects to the plot — the prison is also home to the one man who knows the whereabouts of a mysterious briefcase than can prove Snow’s innocence — but they’re handled with such indifference by directors Stephen St. Leger and James Mather, who co-wrote the screenplay with producer and co-writer, the famed Luc Besson, that they’re hardly worth relating.
The visual effects range from extraordinarily weak and video game-y such as an opening chase sequence that moves at such a quick clip your eyes are likely to need help readjusting, to some decent space effects and a final sequence that only needed Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon to essentially replay the Star Wars Death Star attack.
Where the film falters is in its more dramatic moments. Snow’s whole subplot involving a mysterious briefcase is an immediate turnoff and provides little intrigue going forward. The movie also makes it difficult to take it seriously when its characters are of such determined cartoon stock. Where Pearce is able to sell his formulaic character, Peter Stormare (with his ambiguous foreign accent) and Lennie James (with his “old buddy” schtick) can’t, and the ensemble supporting cast as a whole comes off as exceptionally mediocre. These are the biggest reasons why the movie never quite rises to the occasion.
In the end, the film is mildly salvaged due to the fact Guy Pearce treats it dead seriously. He owns the stupidity to the point it’s hard to believe he was able to keep a straight face, but the film is watchable as a result. You are unlikely to come out telling your friends they need to rush out and see it, but for everything that’s wrong with it, at least you can laugh and enjoy what Pearce brings to the table. So there’s that.