Lockout

Lockout

Directed by Luc Besson

Unbelievably stupid, generic, poorly-written, and poorly-devised, Lockout is sci/fi action at its worst.

The first question I found myself asking during this movie was "how many idiotic one-liners can you fit into a 2-minute long scene?". The answer, it seems, is much greater than I could ever have predicted: the trademark of a screenwriter who truly thinks himself far more clever than he could ever dream of being. Perhaps this would have been acceptable, had any of these lines been less predictably lame than they were, but they were far from it. Just as every joke is obvious, every plot twist and turn is equally impossible not to predict. There are genuinely no surprises in this movie.

Guy Pearce, who has proven himself to be perfectly capable of handling challenging roles, is instead miscast as the typical devil-may-care anti-hero who spends most of his time delivering cheesy one-liners, while trying to convince everyone else that he doesn't care, though deep down he is willing to lay his life on the line to do the right thing -- as I said before, there are no surprises in this movie. Every character in the film is a stereotype, acting not out of motivation, but out of simple need for the plot to progress.

Now, I won't go into specific details regarding the movie's "twist" ending, but I do have something to say regarding its execution: In order for a twist to be effective, it must give us some reason to believe whatever events did or didn't happen wasn't the way it did or didn't happen before you're revealed of what actually did happen. What this movie instead did was conjure a twist out of thin air without giving any indication as to why it should have even existed in the first place. Was it supposed to impress us? "WHOA, you mean to say that thing we didn't see happen didn't happen the way we didn't see it happen?". Where is the logic in that? It's absolutely mind-blowing.

Not even the effects were good. I genuinely have nothing better to say about this movie than that it could have been worse. Is that enough to have made my time worthwhile? Absolutely not. This is one of the worst movies I've seen all year, and certainly one of the least-clever I've seen in some time. It doesn't matter what you're looking for in a movie, you can almost assuredly find it somewhere else, only better. My advice: don't give this movie a second glance. You've been warned.