Short Round: Lockout (2012) **/*****
If you told me six months ago that a movie starring Guy Pearce as a wise-cracking badass who has to break into a space jail in order to save the President’s daughter would be boring, I would have thought you were a crazy person. But now Lockout has come along and proved you right. Writer/directors James Mather and Stephen St. Leger’s new action extravaganza is so by-the-numbers and lacking in thrills that I found myself fighting the urge to fall asleep halfway through, and when your movie synopsis includes words like “Guy Pearce,” “space jail,” and “escaped convicts,” that should never be the case.
The movie’s credits make a point to let us know that the film is being brought to us via “an original idea by Luc Besson,” which is ironic because there isn’t a single sequence in the film that doesn’t feel ripped from something else. In the buildup to Lockout’s release I heard it repeatedly compared to movies like Escape From New York, Alien, and Con Air, and while it does borrow both visual and story elements from all of those places, it never manages to conjure up half the fun of any of its influences (even Con Air). As a matter of fact, if you were to edit together a hodgepodge of all those films’ lamest scenes, you’d still probably create something less boring and more coherent than Besson and his cronies have here.
The main problem with the movie is (aside from the terrible script) Pearce’s character, Snow. He’s the sort of prototypical, snarky badass that should have been a shoo-in for making even the most generic action movie watchable. Pearce is a great actor, and so underutilized in Hollywood that watching him get the lead role in a big action movie should be a celebrated event. But Snow takes the wise-cracking and the bad attitude so far that he’s annoying. There’s never a moment where the character is anything but smug and cool, there’s never anything that comes out of his mouth that isn’t an attempt at a clever quip, and instead of coming off like a lovable anti-hero, he plays more like a bratty child. The fault lies at the feet of the rock dumb script, which gives him so much to say, but fails to make any of it funny or legitimately clever. Pearce is forced to do his best delivering terrible material for 95 minutes straight, and he effectively becomes a bombing comedian given no chance of jumping off the stage. Things get even worse when the terribly unfunny Maggie Grace (as the President’s daughter) shows up and the two start to trade barbs. The resulting banter is so obvious and lame that you’ll want to plug your ears out of embarrassment for everyone involved. A cool hero could have counteracted Lockout’s logic-free plot, or its lame CG effects; but with a dork this unlikable doing all of the ass-kicking, this movie never had a chance.
