Review: LOCKOUT Pilfers Shamelessly From The Greats

It must be said that French uber-producer Luc Besson's "original idea" credit for scifi action picture Lockout is something of a misnomer given that there isn't an original idea to be found anywhere in the film. No, Lockout is a pastiche, a collage of ideas pilfered shamelessly from a handful of other pictures - most notably Escape From New York - and placed in a moderately fresh setting. Luckily for audiences Besson - along with co-directors Stephen St Leger and James Mather - at least has the good sense to steal from the good stuff.

Guy Pearce plays a man simply known as Snow, a former Special Agent now gone freelance. We meet Snow in the midst of a job gone badly wrong, so wrong that the results are going to get him sent away for a thirty year stint in stasis aboard an orbital space prison. Cue the crisis. The President's daughter (Maggie Grace) is leading an investigative trip aboard that same prison, a trip that also goes badly wrong and leaves her a hostage of the freshly woken prisoners who - thankfully - have no clue who she actually is. They've got to get her out and since Snow was on the way anyway, he's clearly the man for the job.

Littered with action movie cliches, cheeseball dialogue and a perplexingly over-CGI'd opening sequence that comes off like a low grade Playstation animatic Lockout is, thankfully, somewhat greater than the sum of its parts. While nobody is ever likely to mistake it for a truly good movie it is nevertheless a very entertaining one. The action - once we get away from the bad CG - is pleasingly kinetic, the two-against-everyone siege premise engaging, and the directors at least skilled enough to turn in a brisk bit of B-movie fun.

The real plus to Lockout, however - and the reason it's worth dropping the coin to go see - is the cast. The cast is positively littered with genre veterans and gifted character actors, all of whom are thankfully smart enough to realize exactly what sort of movie they're in and have a bit of fun with it. Peter Stormare scowls and blusters his way through as Snow's law-and-order nemesis while Vincent Regan (Snow White And The Huntsman, Ghost Rider Spirit Of Vengeance, Clash Of The Titans) rallies the cons to order. But head and shoulders above everyone else are Joseph Gilgun and Guy Pearce, both of whom positively own the screen whenever they appear on it.

Best known for his role as Woody in Shane Meadows' This Is England Gilgun undergoes a complete transformation here, playing the psychotic Hydell with a panache so far over the top that he's starting to come up from underneath again. Gilgun's may very well be the most entertaining villain performance delivered on the big screen this year and should hopefully lead to bigger and better things for the talented character actor.

And then there's Pearce, who is having more fun by a country mile than I can recall ever seeing him have on the big screen before. Pearce is obviously lifting from the Kurt Russell playbook, playing Snow as equal parts Snake Plissken and Jack Burton. He's all swagger and smirk and one liners, the attitude bolstered by the fact that he is, in fact, a legitimate badass. Pearce clearly recognized early on that there's no room for restraint in a film like this and he goes all out from word one.

Flawed? Hell, yes. There are all sorts of things wrong with Lockout. But the goal with a film like this is simply to entertain and Pearce's near-giddy performance as Snow guarantees that the entertainment factor never wavers.