Lockout

The new Sci-Fi thriller, Lockout, has a great premise that is unfortunately tethered to a script that is stuck in second gear. It doesn't manage to generate much excitement, tension, or much of a reason to care about what's going on up on the screen. It has all the elements for a successful action movie - An interesting setting, a wisecracking hero, and the damsel in distress. What it fails to come up with is a reason why this movie needed to be made in the first place.

The film was dreamed up by Luc Besson, a French filmmaker who specializes in making big, dumb action movies. Instead of making the film himself, he turned to first-time writers and directors, James Mather and Stephen St. Leger. Their inexperience shows, as they seem to lack the basic knowledge of how to move a story forward, or to write memorable characters. This is one of those movies that evaporates like vapor from your mind the second it's over. The film is set in the far off future, where prisoners are held within a maximum security prison spaceship that floats just above Earth. The President of the United States sends his daughter (Maggie Grace) up to the ship to take a tour. While she is on board, the convicts overthrow the guards, taking control of the ship, as well as taking everyone hostage.

In movies like this, there's always only "one man" who can get the job done. In this movie, that man is Snow (Guy Pearce), who looks the part of the rugged anti-hero, chain smokes, and knows how to fling out the sarcastic one-liners with the best of them. When we first meet Snow, he's being interrogated for a murder he knows he didn't commit, and that he's being set up for. He's also after a briefcase that a friend of his stashed in a subway locker, and that a lot of people want for some reason. After he is framed for the murder, Snow is about to be sentenced to the orbiting prison ship. But then, the situation with the President's daughter comes up. Luckily for Snow, the President realizes that he's the only one capable enough to break into the ship, and rescue his daughter.

All of this set up takes well over a half hour or so. By the time Snow is up in orbit, we're ready for the dumb action to take over. What follows is hardly worth the wait. We get Snow running down a lot of spaceship corridors, shooting at everyone in his path. Then, when he finally rescues the President's daughter, we get Snow and the President's daughter running down a lot of spaceship corridors, shooting at everyone in their path. And yet, with all this running and shooting, the movie never generates any real excitement. If anything, it becomes monotonous, repeating the same kind of scenes over and over. In a movie such as this, the action sequences are pretty much what it is judged on. In Lockout's case, they fail on just about every level.

This is a film that treats its audience with total indifference. It gives us two main villains, but forgets to give them anything interesting to do. It gives us a comically bickering hero and heroine as they fight for their lives, but nothing they say is all that funny. Perhaps the worst offense is the climax. It not only forgets to throw in a final fight with the main villains, but the wrap up sequence is horribly convoluted, and leaves us with a bad taste in our mouths. By this point, we're wishing the thing would just be over already. As the ending unfolded, I was certain that just about any kind of ending would have been welcome. And yet, the ending the filmmakers have chosen here somehow make things worse. That's quite the feat.

To be fair, Lockout has been made with some degree of technical skill. The effects, while not ground breaking, are better than you'd expect given how uninspired everything else about it is. That said, there's still no real reason to see this, especially not with the much more creative Cabin in the Woods opening the same weekend. I have no doubt that this movie will make money. (Luc Besson movies usually do.) I just suspect that most people walking out will think they should have done something else with their money this time around.

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