Review No.68: Lockout

After two fairly specialist films I think its time to have something completely mind-numbing so step forward Lockout. The film stars Guy Pearce as Snow a CIA Agent who is framed for killing one of his fellow agents with a video being seemingly waterproof evidence. Meanwhile president' daughter Emilie played by Maggie Grace, formerly Shannon from Lost,  journeys to M.S. One a prison floating in space in which all the prisoners are in suspended animation. To nobody's surprise at all when one of the prisoners named Hydell is released from his cell he holds up Emilie's party and makes the wardens empty all of the cells causing a prison riot. What they don't know is that Emilie is actually the president's daughter so to capitalise on this they send Snow up to M.S. One to rescue her himself posing as a prisoner. Snow hopes to find his former contact, also a prisoner on M.S. One, to prove his innocence but first he has to make his way through the rioters led by Hydell and his slightly more stable brother Alex. As you can imagine there is a lot of banging and crashing along the way and some very unspecial special effects.

A lot of Lockout doesn't work the action is unspectacular, some of the plot points make little to no sense and at times it was just plain boring. However what Lockout does have going for it is a brilliant cast who get into the spirit of things to try and keep us interested for as long as possible. Guy Pearce is a charismatic leading man who can even be charming when being punched repeatedly in the face, as he is in the opening scene, he also shares a great chemistry with Maggie Grace with the pair's scenes together reminiscent of those between Gwyneth Paltrow and Robert Downey Jr. in the Iron Man Films. In his first major American movie This is England's Joseph Gilgun gives a good accounting of himself as the psychopathic Hydell with you really believing how unhinged this man is while as his brother Vincent Regan also shines. There are also great supporting turns from Peter Stomare and Lennie James both playing government agents however I feel Stomare would've been better playing one of the crazy prisoners because let's face it he's done it before. A criticism of the film would be that it's far too short for us to care about any of the characters despite how good the performances may be and also there's not enough time to build up the various plot strands, such as Snow's framing and the romance between he and Emilie, before the final scene. However this mash-up of It Happened One Night and Con Air in space was bolstered by some game performers even if the script sucked.

Verdict: A rubbish script and some crummy special effects were saved by some very game cast members so I'll meet them all halfway by giving Lockout 5/10