Review: Lockout
The future, a federal prison ... location? Space! Guy Pearce plays Snow, a man framed for a crime he did not commit. With a carrot of freedom hanging over his head, Snow accepts a mission to rescue the President’s daughter from the aforementioned floating Alcatraz. The problem? The inmates have broken free of their cryogenic slumber and now run the asylum. Not only have the inmates broken free of cryogenic slumber, someone gave them a camera, a budget and let them make this colossal trainwreck of a movie. Welcome to Lockout!
A concept like a floating space prison requires a certain amount of suspension of disbelief. It's perfectly fine to require some amount or belief suspension, but there is a level where it becomes abusive. Lockout requires the viewer to abandon all logic, reason and gray matter at the door.
The problem with this movie starts with its initial premise. The government in partnership with "generic evil mega corporation" has spent trillions of dollars constructing a highly technical, space-bound prison. The problem is they built a technical masterpiece with a security system worse than an unattended box of Cracker Jack. No-one in their right mind would build a space station without some type of ground-based on/off switch.
This gap in logic reminded me of another movie with a severe logic hole: Die Hard 2. In Die Hard 2, a group of terrorists takes over an airport in the Washington, D.C. area. They do creative things like shut off the runway lights, causing a plane to crash. The logic problem: There are no less than 20 airports within 100 miles of Washington, D.C. Die Hard 2 immediately lost me with that illogical premise, much as Lockout did when the inmates were able to fully control the station with little effort.
The screenplay for Lockout, written by co-directors James Mather and Stephen St. Leger with Luc Besson, further compounds the absurdity of this story with weak and unrealistic characters. The screenwriters seem to believe that people employed on a space prison have no sense of self-preservation or empathy for fellow employees. Employee after employee assists the inmates (under duress) in their conquest of the prison, only to find themselves summarily executed when their assistance is no longer needed. I would like to say this is a spoiler but a running current throughout the film is the lack of authenticity in its characters.
The only shining light in this movie is Guy Pearce in the role of Snow. I think when the script landed in his hands he had to say to himself: "You are going to pay me millions of dollars for...this?!? Where do I sign!" Pearce does an admirable job of playing the the cartoonish action hero. Lucky for us, Snow is in the majority of the movie and that made this film almost tolerable enough to sit through.
When watching this Lockout, one has to think back to John Carpenter's classic film Escape from New York. Lockout tried to be Escape from New York in Space but falls far short of its execution. Avoid this pile of space wreckage at all costs.