REVIEW - LOCKOUT

I’m a Guy Pearce fan.

There’s a sentence I can’t imagine is uttered all too much outside of the Pearce family living room.

I don’t care though. I like the guy. He’s an underrated talent. Memento was great. The Proposition was a well-made piece of work. L.A. Confidential was fantastic, and Ravenous remains one of the more underrated horror flicks of all time. The dude brings an air of legitimacy to almost anything he’s cast in.

Like I said, I’m a Guy Pearce fan.

Deal with it you sons of bitches.

Because of my card card-carrying status as a member of the Guy Pearce Fan Club I was willing to give Lockout the benefit of the doubt. I even paid three bucks for it through Amazon OnDemand.

That was stupid of me.

Those bucks could have bought me a candy bar – two of them.

Lockout is basically about falsely convicted government agent (Pearce) who is sent on a mission to a prison in space to save the life of the president’s daughter. Yeah, I know, that sounds an awful lot like Escape From New York, right? Yep, it sure does. The entire film is a hodgepodge of stuff that has come before and stuff that was done much better the first time around.  It stealsborrowspayshomageto more genre flicks than I can name and Pearce’s character is somewhatmostlybasically Snake Plissken without an eye patch and feathered 80’s hair.

Still, on the rare occasions that the movie actually works, it works because of Guy Pearce. Plisskin 2 has a fair amount of charisma. He’s mostly fun to watch, he’s relatively easy to like, and you find yourself basically rooting for him to pull off the impossible. Those are all positives when it comes to this kind of movie.

It’s just too bad that everything else sucks.

Maggie Grace is a mess. The inmates are annoying. The supporting cast is more of a mess than Maggie Grace. And the inmates are still annoying. Also, here’s a tip to all the aspiring filmmakers out there: if you don’t have the budget to pull off an effects shot, come up with a workaround. Really terrible digital effects are far worse than no digital effects at all. There’s a motorcycle “chase” within the first ten minutes of the movie that made some of the fine work in Sharktopus seem like it deserved an Academy Award.

Lockout was directed by a pair of guys named James Mather and Stephen St. Leger, and Luc Besson apparently helped them write it. Despite the many claims of orgy-porn throughout the years, two heads aren’t always better than one, and three heads is just awkward and uncomfortable.

I’m a fan of Guy Pearce.

I still can’t recommend this movie.

It’s not fun enough to be a stupid-fun action flick and it makes no attempt to be anything else. It’s also a waste of a damn fine performer, which might be the most frustrating thing of all.

Sorry, Guy Pearce.

-STEVEN