‘Locked Down’ Falls Short of Its COVID19-Heist Premise
Endless potential wasted.
Picture this: a heist-comedy, set during the COVID-19 lockdown, made by one of the most versatile filmmakers working today, with two * excellent* actors in the lead roles, accompanied by a robust supporting cast; how could it not work? The answer’s simple: if you spend the first NINETY MINUTES of a 118-minute film moping around in an apartment complaining about lockdown instead of…I dunno…doing a heist film in the vein of Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 11?
Doug Liman’s Locked Down fails to assess the untapped potential of a heist film set during the most unprecedented times, where humans are now making the most unprecedented actions to save as many lives as possible. Broken-up couple Linda (Anne Hathaway) and Paxton (Chiwetel Ejiofor) are now forced to spend lockdown together.
They are both looking forward to starting anew, without each other at their support until Paxton’s boss (Ben Kingsley) offers him a job opportunity to deliver precious cargo from diverse department stores to Heathrow. When Linda realizes that Paxton will be posing with a Fake-ID to perform the job and knows the security credentials at Harrod’s, she gets the *brilliant* idea to steal a diamond worth 3 million pounds and send the replica to New York. If the plot sounds tantalizing to you, thinking it’ll be an Ocean’s 11-style film set during COVID, you’re unfortunately quite wrong.
The biggest problem with Locked Down is that it has no sense of pace. As I mentioned before, you spend the first NINETY minutes of the movie, doing absolutely nothing. Long monologues of the couple in a nervous breakdown, having to cope with the idea of staying home for eternity when they hate their guts, replace the best parts of heist films; the plan. We never really know how the heist will be executed, which never allows us to connect with the characters.
Writer Steven Knight is too busy writing overlong sequences where Hathaway’s character complains about her job and cigarettes. At the same time, Ejiofor reads poetry on the street to entertain their fellow “inmates” (neighbors) who are forced to stay home. All of this time where the plot never moves forward could’ve been either trimmed down or used in another direction, developing the characters’ relationship in the first act (which should be, in this case, no more than 30 minutes) to get to the point.
Even if Chiwetel Ejiofor and Anne Hathaway give decent performances, alongside fun extended cameos from Ben Kingsley (who delivered the most earnest performance of the film, through FaceTime), Ben Stiller, Mindy Kaling, Mark Gatiss, Lucy Boynton, and Steven Merchant, Locked Down is never in a hurry to get to the point. Even during the “heist” (if you can call it that) sequence at Harrod’s, Knight believes it’s important for the story to STOP (for the thousandth time) for a useless picnic on the roof of the store. It’s mostly filled with pointless sequences, which *somehow* link through a semblance of a first-draft that *may* contain a great story…but it’s buried through eternal Zoom/Skype/FaceTime calls, dialogue-heavy sequences that go on for way too long which repeats the protagonists’ problems incessantly.
While there are some funny sequences, all of them involve Ben Kingsley’s hilarious supporting performance of Paxton’s boss/preacher, which contain dynamite comedic timing from both Kingsley & Ejiofor and some genuine laughs sprinkled through a terribly uninspired script, it isn’t enough for Locked Down to hold its own. Unintentional comedy on Zoom due to children or other unpredictable elements is a problem we’re now all familiar with. Locked Down does offer some fun comedy involving Zoom, particularly with Ben Stiller. Yet, most of the supporting cast could’ve been cut entirely out of the movie since they’re the ones who never move the plot forward.
If Liman & Knight made a tighter, unpredictable heist-comedy that fully embraced the genre it tries to emulate, to showcase how memorable it could be to perform an elaborate heist during a time where everyone is at home, Locked Down could’ve been a home run. The ingredients for a good recipe stick out like a sore thumb; the comedic moments that work are fantastic. The actors seem to care about the movie; there isn’t a single bad shot and/or cut in this, yet very little will keep you engaged.
Maybe it’s best not to write a quick script in the hopes of making a film during a pandemic that’s killing thousands daily and is still going on as we speak. Even better: maybe it’s best not to make a movie about the pandemic lockdown when many countries are entering a second (or third) lockdown? Just sayin’.
Locked Down is available to stream on HBO Max for viewers in the United States. For Canadian viewers, the film is available to stream on CRAVE, at no extra cost.
