Maggie Grace and Guy Pierce in “Lockout”
“LOCKOUT” My rating: C (Opens wide on April 13)
95 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
There are moments in “Lockout” — usually when Guy Pearce is channelling his best “Die Hard”-era Bruce Willis — that you really wish this Aussie actor got better material.
“Lockout” is easiest described by listing the movies it rips off: The original “Die Hard,” “Escape from New York,” the first “Star Wars”…it’s not so much a movie as a laundry list of references.
The writers and directors — James Mather and Stephen St. Leger — start things off with a nifty sequence. Pierce’s character, a CIA agent named Snow, is tied to a chair and being roughed up by a goon. Between deafening punches, Snow cracks wise. He’s cocky and funny and sardonic. An Energizer Bunny with a steel jaw.
It seems that Snow has been accused of being a double agent and of murdering his CIA boss — but you can forget all that because the movie certainly does. That stuff is all a big red herring.
No, what the movie is actually about is a prison riot…on a prison satellite in orbit over Earth. Oh, did I neglect to mention that this yarn takes place 60 years in the future?
Yep, in the 2070s hardened criminals are rocketed into outer space and do their time in a frozen state. (Which makes no sense, because when they have served their sentence they wake up the same age as when they went in…and where’s the punishment in that?)
Anyway, the prisoners on this space prison have thawed out and taken over the place. Among their hostages is the daughter of the President of the United States (Maggie Grace), who was visiting the facility on some do-gooder mission. And now the only person skilled enough to rescue her is — you guessed it — Snow.
“Lockout” has some decent special effects, some incoherent fight scenes, and an off-the-wall performance by Brit actor Joseph Gilgun as a skinny, mohawked, cloudy-eyed psychopath. Apparently Ben Foster was not available.
Grace (late of TV’s “Lost”…and she played Liam Neeson’s kidnapped daughter in “Taken”) is surprisingly good in the girl role, holding her own against Pierce’s laconic, hard-to-rattle Snow.
“Lockout” is good for a couple of minor thrills, some solid chuckles, and not much else.
|Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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