Lockout is one giant ball of cheese. No, scratch that. Cheese at least has some nutritional value. This is more like Cheez Whiz: It’s not very good for you and it’s composed entirely of artificial, stomach-churning ingredients, but you might enjoy it more than you care to admit, especially after midnight.
The premise is like a Mad Libs puzzle filled out by John Carpenter and Roger Corman: The president’s daughter, Emilie Warnock, (Maggie Grace, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1) is kidnapped by prisoners when a riot breaks out at a prison she’s visiting during a humanitarian fact-finding mission. Only it’s not a regular prison – it’s space prison, an orbital facility overseen by the “Low Orbit Police Department” that houses five hundred of the worst criminals humanity has to offer.
Her potential rescuer is Snow (Guy Pearce of Seeking Justice), an ex-CIA operative who’s been framed for treason. He’s offered a pardon if he can rescue Emilie, because that’s the kind of legal agreement that gets worked out in movies like this.
There are one of two ways to react to this setup. It is, depending on your particular sensibilities, either ridiculously moronic or ridiculously awesome. Neither reaction is really wrong – it’s obviously dumb, but also kind of great, in an Escape From New York kind of way – but, as it plays out onscreen, it’s unfortunately long on the stupid and short on the awesome.
The characters are cookie-cutter generic, but that’s hardly a damning indictment; B-movies this thoroughly B rarely rely on complex characterization. Pearce makes a decent square-jawed, chain-smoking, wise-cracking asshole, and Grace carries the material she’s asked to carry. The supporting cast is nicely rounded out, with welcome appearances from the likes of Lennie James (Hung) and Peter Stormare (Wilfred), who excel in these sorts of roles.
The ideas the film tosses around don’t feel that fresh, either, not that it matters much. The government is corrupt, increasingly unconcerned with civil liberties and in bed with giant conglomerates that would love nothing more than to run unethical tests on prisoners if it means higher profit margins. Genre films have trafficked in this kind of unsubtle (but not wrong-headed) political commentary for decades, so the inclusion of a few warmed-over ideas is hardly unforgivable.
The real trouble with the film is the action simply isn’t very good. It’s easy to ignore bad dialogue and cliches when watching a movie about rescuing the president’s daughter from space prison, but bad action is harder to gloss over. It’s the beer, and everything else is just froth. Sadly, this is one flat beer.
Directors James Mather and Stephen St. Ledger (relative newcomers who worked together on the short Prey Alone) too frequently succumb to the frenetic, what-the-hell-am-I-watching shaky-cam chaos of too many modern action films. The fights mostly seem well choreographed, so it’s a shame the editing is so unfocused that it’s hard to tell what’s going on.
Still, for all its flaws, I wouldn’t discourage anyone from seeing Lockout. It’s a deeply imperfect movie, but in a world of focus-grouped blockbusters that seem more like two-hour-long toy ads than actual films, it’s an admirably shaggy, populist throwback. It seems to have been made for fun, not for a paycheck, and that counts for a lot. Just make sure you watch it after midnight, preferably with a few drinks in your system.
VERDICT: It’s not quite fun enough to make up for its stupidity, but Lockout remains a relatively solid B-movie.
rgifford@umdbk.com
