Lockout - Online Review

'The early motorcycle chase and action sequence purports to be through some sort of futuristic city, but the special effects work is so poor it may as well be through my living room.'

Proof definite that a script choc-full of smart, witty dialogue does not a movie make, Lockout starts with wise-cracking Snow (Guy Pearce) firing off one-liners as quickly as a guy called Rupert (Michael Sopko) punches him in the mouth. Snow is one of those legion of protagonists - from Bond to John McClane - for whom laughter is not only the best medicine but the best weapon and much of the opening fifteen minutes or so of Lockout occasionally reach laugh out loud territory.

The parts that don't make you giggle are largely full of poorly directed action, masked behind even poorer CGI and it is here where the cracks in Lockout start to show. James Mather and Stephen St. Leger's film (they co-wrote the script with Luc Besson) may have the gift of the gab, but elsewhere it is lacking. The early motorcycle chase and action sequence purports to be through some sort of futuristic city, but the special effects work is so poor it may as well be through my living room. Later scenes - once Snow has made it to the film's main location, a prison in orbit - show off action nous only in isolation, suggesting that even if you could see what was going on, it wouldn't be particularly worthy of your attention. You wonder quite why, when the central concept is so low-budget friendly, the directors opted to go all whiz-bang during the opening.

Something of a departure for Pearce, from roles and films that require some thought and have some depth, into straight high-concept action, he excels in what could be a franchise-friendly star turn. Opposite him, Maggie Grace is given the regular token love interest/damsel in distress style of lines but does perfectly fine with what she has. Elsewhere, the support gets thinner. Lennie James is cornering the market as Sergeant Smith, The Guy Who Gives You Your Orders And/Or Hunts You Down (see also: Colombiana, The Next Three Days) without doing anything to single himself out from the plethora of others who do a similar sort of thing. Peter Stormare is pleasantly growly but Vincent Regan is much better as an anti-hero than as a villain and it proves occasionally impossible to tell what Joseph Gilgun is saying.

Eventually we head to two predictable things; a big space-based set piece that looks like Star Wars on the cheap and at least the insinuation that Snow and Emilie (Grace) might be about to have a close encounter between the sheets. Clearly, in the year 2079, all copies of Speed and its sage mantra that relationships based on extreme events don't work have been erased. Sadly the feeling that we're in something distinctly average does not follow it out of the door, as Lockout culminates on a fairly predictable whimper, rather than a supernova explosion. This is fun for a time in passing, less fun when you look any closer than that.

Lockout is currently available via Sky On Demand and Sky Go.