Lockout
In "Lockout" an orbital maximum security prison is co-opted by the planet’s most notorious criminals who in the latter part of the 21st Century are kept in a frozen cryogenic sleep to keep them at bay. When one of those inmates violently breaks free, a riot ensues. The future president’s do-gooder daughter ("Taken’s" Maggie Grace) gets trapped in the prison revolt and a rogue CIA agent of questionable ethics, played by a masculine, muscled Guy Pearce, is the only man available for the spaced-based rescue mission.
Played like a high-stakes video game, the Unrated Edition of "Lockout" pumps up the violence (and its leading man), but not to a measurably uncomfortable degree. Pearce’s Agent Snow must maneuver through the massive maze of the prison installation, dodge a slew of murderous convicts, and save the First Daughter. All the while Snow manages to creatively outwit his way along the perilously action-oriented very thin script. But the tension proportionately builds to a very climatic orbital skydive that can only happen in the movies!
"Lockout" is presented by Luc Besson who has always masterfully created a fast-paced future-world for his characters to inhabit, and here, as directed by the team of Saint & Mather, the action lives in a much more probable reality than the lush palettes that Besson often imagines. "Lockout" is still as big a blockbuster as you’d expect with its production design, yet there are homages reminiscent of Ridley Scott’s "Alien" and Stanley Kubrick’s "2001: A Space Odyssey". But this is more "Star Wars" in a film noir setting than anything else.
And Guy Pearce in tight tees, sweating through firepower with bulging biceps raises the conspiracy level of the plot to a desirable degree. Packed with the usual special features that take you behind-the-scenes and reveal the special EFX secrets, "Lockout" is worth the TV night lockdown.
"Lockout" (Unrated Edition)
from Sony Pictures
Available in Blu-ray with Ultra Violet download
$22.99
www.sonypictures.com
