As a director, French filmmaker Luc Besson has been responsible for contemporary action and sci-fi classics like Léon: The Professional and The Fifth Element. As a producer, he’s given us the Transporter series and Taken, movies that are as visually attractive as his earlier works, but focus more on stylish action than plot and character development. Lockout, a futuristic action movie co-written by Besson and directors James Mather and Stephen St. Leger, falls into the latter category, with hardly any attempt to create characters that are at all interesting.
Snow (Guy Pearce) is a gun-toting badass in "Lockout"
Set in the not-too-distant future, Lockout stars Guy Pearce as Snow, a government agent who has been mistakenly convicted for the death of another agent. Despite his innocence, the evidence is stacked against him and it looks as if there is no way out for him. That is until the president’s daughter (Maggie Grace) ends up trapped on a space prison where hundreds of hardened killers, rapists and other vagrants have been awakend from their pods. Snow (played with a mix of Mark Wahlberg’s bravado and Johnny Depp’s swagger, with a hint of Bruce Willis’ badass attitude) is offered one opportunity to redeem himself by going into the space station, rescuing the president’s daughter and returning her unharmed. It’s clearly a daunting task, but since Snow is such a badass with nothing to lose (and actually has something to gain if he can track down one particular inmate), of course he’s up for the challenge.
From there Lockout becomes one sci-fi derivation after another, which is all a lot of fun to watch, but not all that stimulating otherwise. Matrix-like chasm of slumbering bodies? Check. Prisoners waking up from cryo sleep a la Demolition Man? Check. Strong female character forced to standup to overwhelmingly testosterone-y odds in very Alien-like settings? You got it. And Although Snow proves to be a noble antihero and his female antagonist-turned-sidekick is also a surprisingly spry fighter, they end up relying on enough convenient coincidences that it starts to feel almost as bad as Armageddon (especially in a scene where they basically skydive from outer space, safely re-entering Earth’s atmosphere only to parachute to the surface, landing with less impact than they’d have had from jumping off a bunk bed).
"Let's skydive into the Earth's atmosphere!"
Don’t get me wrong, there are certainly much worse movies out there, especially in the sci-fi/action genre. But I guess even with his more recent productions, Besson has still been able to apply his touch even if it’s not as overt as when he has more control as a director. But this time it hardly feels like he was involved very much, even though Lockout is based on a concept he came up with and, like most of his other films, was at least partially written by him. And even with the legitimate acting skills Pearce brings to the movie, it still almost feels like a Syfy original or straight-to-DVD release. Let’s just hope the tagline for his next movie is “from the director of The Fifth Element” instead of “from the producers of Taken.”
Lockout. Directed by James Mather and Stephen St. Leger. Starring Guy Pearce and Maggie Grace. Rated PG-13. www.lockoutfilm.com.
