Lockout: ***/*****, or 7/10
The
contemporary major Hollywood studios are not known for their
originality. The abundance of sequels, reboots, remakes, reimaginings
and the like, all for the purpose of building marketable and easily
exploitable franchises, allows little room for any well conceived
fresh ideas to swing into full production and hit theaters. New ideas
seemingly remain the province of the smaller independent studios
circling Hollywood, often praised for their “European” attitude
towards intriguing scripts and securing finance for their smaller
scaled but emotionally more elaborate set-up. However, in truth the
European sensibility isn't much different at all, as proven by the
European 'major' Luc Besson, who is well known for producing dynamic
motion pictures similar in style and substance to their American
counterparts, in typically American genres like action and science
fiction. While Besson has skillfully directed a fair amount of superb
European genre movies that were also accessible to overseas
audiences, like Léon (1994) and The Fifth Element
(1997), many of the movie projects he takes under his wing as a
producer are less original. So when the credits of Lockout reveal
the film was 'based on an original idea by Luc Besson', such a
statement has to be taken with a grain of salt, considering the film
is a highly derivative product of other movies, chief among them John
Carpenter's classic Escape from New York (1981).
'In
the not too distant future, a disgraced soldier is charged with a
secret mission to retrieve a person of importance from an
out-of-control maximum security prison, where utter lawlessness rules
as the inmates are in control.' An apt short synopsis for Escape
from New York, as easily applicable to Lockout. Main
differences being that the prison in the former is located on
Manhattan, walled off from the rest of the world, while in the latter
it's literally off-world as the prison is located on a giant space
station called MS One. The identity of the people in need of rescue
from the clutches of the depraved prisoners are also a close match,
but not quite identical. In Escape from New York the mission
objective is the United States President, who very conveniently ended
up in the worst place on Earth, the last place where he would want to
find himself in, considering the deplorable prison is ironically the
result of his administration. In Lockout, the honor of ending
up in the worst place off Earth is reserved for his daughter Emilie
(played by Maggie Grace of Lost fame (back when Lost
hadn't written itself to death yet in a plethora of extremely
convoluted plot twists, which is the exact opposite of Lockout's
seemingly lazy writing process)), who chose to go up to MS One on a
bleeding heart PR-trip to make sure the inmates are treated nicely.
They're not of course, and when all hell breaks loose as they escape
their stasis cells, the First Daughter will pay the price for the
penitentiary's faults, if the escapees find out her true identity.
The
stage is set, the victim is chosen and the battle lines between the
angry convicts and the incompetent authorities are drawn. Enter a
lone rogue, suckered into saving the government official from certain
death with freedom as his reward. In Escape from New York, the
rogue dispatched to enter the hell hole was called Snake Plissken
(Kurt Russell), a one-eyed ex-special forces agent done with doing
government chores, turning to an outlaw life instead so he didn't
have to take crap from nobody no more, armed with a general 'fuck
you' attitude and whatever guns he can his hands on. It proved to be
a singularly badass character, good for a sequel with an all too
similar plot, Escape from L.A. (1996). Lockout enters
its own anti-hero, recently disgraced CIA operative Snow who is
charged with murder and treason, planned to be send to MS One anyway
for his alleged crimes (of which he is naturally innocent), until it
occurs to his superiors deploying him to save the President's little
girl is their best bet, while negotiators try to reason with the
unreasonable bad guys for their hostages' lives as a diversion. So
off he goes, sneaking into the facility, aiming to get out of the
rampaging prisoners' claws himself as he figures out a way to smuggle
his objective to safety. Snow, played enthusiastically by Guy Pearce,
is a tough and cynical military man with his heart in the right
place, despite being framed in an espionage plot. Of course he
doesn't give a damn about the mission at first but eventually he
establishes a rapport with Emilie, without the situation getting too
typically mushy and sentimental (though with a hint of sexual tension
due to possible romantic feelings interspersed throughout the whole,
without feeling like an in-your-face love relationship, which would
have felt contrived and inappropriate). Grace delivers ample witty
remarks against Pearce's many rude and sexist comments, often with
much needed hilarious effect to keep the film from revolving solely
around the ensuing violence. Snow may not look and sound as iconic as
Snake (the eye patch is sorely missed), but his relation with Emilie
adds a dimension of character levity Snake had to do without. You
didn't see him engage in sarcastic dialogue with the President.
Equally
entertaining to behold is the ensemble of crazed psychopaths catching
the brunt of Snow's wrath as he struggles for his life and Emilie's.
Amongst the assorted rapists and serial killers are nightmarish men –
the prisoners are all male, unfortunately: it might have been
thoroughly entertaining to see what screwed up female convicts Besson
and his directors could have concocted – you would only expect in
extra-terrestrial prisons, devoid of any humanity, only out to
ruthlessly maul people, including their fellow inmates. Most
noteworthy is the original escapee, a true psycho named Hydell
(Joseph Gilgun), sporting an emaciated physique, a dead eye and a
bunch of creepy tattoos to go along with his already freaky stature
perfectly. Emilie made the mistake of interviewing Hydell on MS One's
living conditions first, resulting in the obsessive criminal spending
the rest of the film trying to get his hands on her in order to
perform whatever ungodly unspeakable obscenities on her if he gets
the chance, while at the same time releasing the rest of the
detainees. Equally menacing is his older brother Alex (Vincent
Regan), who may lack Hydell's degenerate bodily qualities but makes
up for it in full by being the hardest yet the most intelligent man
on the station and as such the de facto leader of the villainous gang
of thugs, killing everybody who would challenge his merciless rule
while managing to keep his monstrous brother in check for a while
longer. Alex and Hydell rule their conquered prize with an iron fist,
the latter terrorizing the staff and their fellow prisoners while the
former conceives a plan to get off the station alive, with poor
Emilie at the heart of it, much to her dismay. All the while, Snow
has to make his way through scores of similarly fucked up bad guys,
one more vile and subhuman than the other, to ensure the pair of them
get out in one piece. While Snow and Emilie drive the plot, it's the
inhuman prisoners that supply the fun and the actors behind them that
are shown to be the most capable performers in the piece. Snake
Plissken apparently had it easy: most of the criminals he encountered
weren't half as repulsive or unstable as the villains Snow has to
face.
The one
element Lockout cannot do without as much as Escape from
New York couldn't, is action. Though Besson handed over the
director's chair to a pair of newcomers to directing, James Mather
and Stephen St. Leger, it's clear they studied their producer's flair
for adrenaline packed stunts and fireworks intensively, adding yet
another high voltage action flick to Besson's already explosive
oeuvre, and of course to their own. Where action is concerned, the
movie definitely should not had have to rely on visual effects work
alone, since in many cases the CGI is of rather poor quality (still
an often heard complaint in European films of a bigger budget).
Though the establishing shots of the MS One space station look decent
enough, the same cannot be said for a highway chase scene in the
beginning of the movie, nor in a space battle between the
penitentiary's defensive guns and a small fleet of fighter ships
later on. The effects of both scenes are painfully reminiscent of any
poorly rendered video game of the last few years and only show
European effects departments still have a long way to go before
they're on par with their American counterparts. On the action front,
it's the close quarters fisticuffs that form the film's strength,
pitching poor Pearce against an array of angry convicts, resulting in
many a gun battle as well as hand to hand fights employing knifes,
tools and bare hands as both parties try to viciously take each other
out as gruesomely (and for the audience, desirably) as possible.
Compared to visual effects in general this may look like crude
technique, but it looks a whole lot more realistic than anything the
computers contributed to Lockout and
is sure an awful lot more fun to watch.
Overall,
whatever Lockout's end credits claim, original this movie is
not. In fact, a few minor dissimilarities with Escape from New
York aside, it's as close to movie plot theft as you can get,
apparently driven by the desire to make a few bucks off the story of
an established cult classic that just won't get remade instead.
However, it is all kinds of fun, both as a guilty pleasure for those
aware of John Carpenter's previous addition to the genre and as a
decent action flick for those who are not. Though Guy Pearce is no
Kurt Russell and his agent Snow would never be a fair match for
Snake, he carries the film with enough rude bravura and physical
prowess as an action (anti-)hero to make us run along with him, while
Maggie Grace adds an enjoyable new element to the mix as the damsel
in distress who in the end takes to the fight herself as much as
necessary in order to show there has been some progression on the
gender front in the action genre in the last thirty years. Rookie
directors Mather and Leger accomplish an excellent feat by accepting
the thankless job of directing what's basically an Escape from New
York rip-off but making it feel slick and adrenaline packed to
such an extent the general audience won't notice and the film buffs
won't care about their near sacrilegious undertaking all that much.
However, Besson had better spend some time developing a truly
original story for his future projects, instead of aiming to
copy+paste Carpenter's sequel Escape from L.A. next. After
all, you can only plagiarize so many movie plots before public
opinion turns against you and you're send off to prison yourself.
And
watch the trailer here:
