Tuesday Review: Lockout (2012)

    It’s Escape from New York, only dumber. And boring.

    For a brief while there, John Carpenter talked up doing a third Escape movie, featuring his and Kurt Russell’s indelible creation Snake Plissken. Entitled Escape from Earth, not much is known about the project (I sincerely doubt it ever got past the idea stage), but presumably the film would have seen Plissken escaping from, well… the planet Earth. The idea of a space-bound and more overtly sci-fi Snake Plissken adventure has taunted Carpenter fans for years, but considering the director’s output over the last two decades, it’s probably a blessing the film never came to be. But clearly the idea proved too irresistible to pass up, as Lockout more or less finally gives us a very Plissken-esque anti-hero in space. Sadly, the film fails to live up to its goofy premise, sailing right past the “so bad it’s good” affectation into just straight-up bad.

    Based on a story from Luc Besson, it’s hard to tell if the French action-maestro took his ideas from the abandoned Escape from Earth, but Besson clearly had Snake Plissken on the brain when crafting his story: taking place in the future, Lockout follows CIA agent Snow, who’s wrongfully committed of a murder of a fellow agent when a meeting goes bad. Sentenced to life in prison, the agency decides instead to send Snow to MS One, a space station orbiting the Earth where especially dangerous prisoners have broken out of their cryo-sleep and taken over the facility, holding the visiting President’s daughter hostage to boot. It’s all really ridiculous, but could make for a fun movie in the right hands. But aside from having Guy Pearce putting forth his best action hero face, directors James Mather and Stephen St. Leger manage to make a movie about breaking into a space prison rather boring and inert.

    As Snow, Pearce is really the only thing the movie has going for it. The best part of the movie is the opening credits, where Snow is beaten and interrogated while tossing off some amusing one-liners. But while Pearce is clearly having fun, the one-liners quickly grow tiresome, to the point where that’s pretty much all Snow seems capable of. The rest of the cast is suitably wasted: Maggie Grace does the whole damsel in distress thing well enough as the hostage daughter of the President, but these roles only grow more tiresome as the years go on. It’s also nice to see Vincent Regan get a leading villainous role here as the lead prisoner, but he’s constantly undercut by the film he’s in (he doesn’t even get a cool death scene). We also get Peter Stormare in one of his patented sleazy roles as the Secret Service chief who busts Pearce’s balls throughout the film, but the role is another cliché that’s so tired I can’t even be bothered to look up his character’s name.

    Tired is a good word to describe Lockout, as every element of the film has been used before and most certainly used to better effect. It’s an incredibly stupid movie - almost aggressively so. The film is constantly throwing out any number of ridiculous scenarios, almost daring you to look it in the face and take it seriously; such as the mouth-agape scene where Pearce and Grace are forced to evacuate the exploding space prison by putting on special exosuits and skydiving into the atmosphere, where they parachute down rather miraculously in New York City. All this silliness could be forgiven (even welcome) had the film had any sense of excitement, but the action is so ineptly shot and inherently PG-13 that even a zero-gravity fight scene becomes a snooze-fest. Couple that with the dodgy CGI *, and the film at times becomes an endurance test for schlock-y genre work.

    Being a massive fan of Escape from New York and Luc Besson, I held onto the hope that Lockout would turn out to be a fun little romp. Sadly, despite a strong leading man in Guy Pearce, Lockout sizzles from the mind quicker than a piece of space junk in atmospheric reentry.  


    * Which is mostly inoffensive, aside from a horrid chase scene at the beginning which was so poorly animated I was tempted to shut the movie off then and there **. 

    ** And while we’re on the subject of that chase scene, now would be a good time to discuss Snow’s miraculous motorcycle that somehow drives without a front wheel. It speaks to the level of un-imagination found in science fiction movies today, where countless directors design things to look cool or different without giving even the slightest thought to how it might even conceivably work in the real world.