Lockout: Plot Point Pitfall Action Schlock

While the ads dub Lockout as being “Die Hard in space,” an even more apt tagline, if I were running things, would be “No Escape meets Escape From New York.” Although I can see why the marketing department went their way over mine. Bruce Willis’ action classic is a bit more memorable to most moviegoers than the Ray Liotta/Kevin Dillon guilty pleasure from the ‘90s or the 31-year-old John Carpenter cult classic starring Kurt Russell as a baddie who gets tasked with rescuing the president from New York City, which has become a maximum security prison in the not-so-distant future.

And yet, I still stand by my comparison. Because if you substitute NYC for a low-orbit space station, swap out Snake Plissken for Guy Pearce’s only-one-name-necessary Snow, and exchange the Prez with the First Daughter, and you’ve got yourself the wholly mediocre Lockout. As much as I love Pearce, and as well as he plays the I-couldn’t-give-two-shits wisecracking badass, there’s just not much else to like here. His one-liners rival the wit of Sandra Bullock’s character in Speed while the action sequences consist mainly of Snow and Maggie Grace’s Emilie Warnock running away from hordes of deranged, recently released convicts while miraculously avoiding capture and gunshots only to lock themselves on the other side of a door just seconds before the psychos arrive and peer in through the window, somehow unable to open the door that was open just seconds before. (That is, aside from the opening sequence, which finds Snow hurling through the city on a futuristic motorcycle in an completely incoherent anime-style, heavily CGI’d chase scene that might have been exciting had I been able to catch anything that was going on other than the long streaky lines indicating just how fast Snow was going.)

You see, Snow is an ex-CIA agent. When we meet him, he’s getting interrogated (read: beat up) by Secret Service head honcho Langral (Peter Stormare, who has no idea which accent he’s supposed to be using, which is all the more confusing because we have no reason to believe he’s foreign, and it also doesn’t play at all into the movie or his character) who wants to know what happened in the hotel room. Amidst Snow getting smashed with right hooks and still delivering incessant sarcastic quips, we flashback to see Snow in a firefight, in a hotel room, where his CIA buddy dies – but, not before handing him a Zippo lighter and a briefcase. Long story short, Langral thinks Snow killed this guy for the briefcase and wants to know where it is. But Snow passed it off to his friend Mace (Remember that motorcycle chase scene?) before they captured him. So Langral pulls a Judge Dredd and gives Snow a 30-year sentence on MS-One – yup, the space prison.

But this isn’t just any ordinary space prison, you see. Because the prisoners aren’t all locked up in their cells trading smokes and putting posters on their walls. This is a state-of-the-art space prison, which means all the inmates are in a form of cryo-sleep called stasis. No riots, no shower rape, no escapes. Punishment even your mother could love. That is, until do-good First Daughter Emilie Warnock travels there to make sure that the prisoners are being treated properly – something about the whole thing being a front for testing the perils of deep space exploration on the human body. Then all hell breaks loose. And naturally the best plan to save her is to not deploy the Marines, of course. Oh no, no, no. Too many Marines, and it’ll just be a bloodbath and all the hostages will die, you see. Better to send just one man.

Mr. Marion Snow, to the rescue.

It’s all quite ridiculous and that’s certainly what you expect and hope for when you’re dealing with a movie about space prisons. Yet, with Luc Besson involved – as producer and co-writer – I expected a bit more. Here’s a guy who wrote The Transporter series and Taken, so he knows how to craft a solid action flick. Yet, here in Lockout, every plot point just feels so “Oh, and then this happens!” without any reason or logic behind it, without much explanation. For example, at one point Warnock and her Secret Service protector (who was completely at fault for the entire prison break yet never gets called out on it) escape from the bad guys and – as happens countless times in the movie – lock themselves in some room. Only apparently this isn’t just some random room, it’s like the space prison equivalent of a panic room. Snow finds them and figures, job done: the president’s daughter is locked up safe, no one can get in, just send in the cavalry and we can all go home. Except, wait, the oxygen levels are dropping rapidly for no good reason whatsoever other than to throw a wrench in the plot, so now Snow has to bust them out of what we just established as being an impregnable fortress. I don’t want to ruin it for you, but I bet you can guess whether or not he manages to break her out of there before she dies. (Bonus points if you guessed that it’s insanely easy to break into the impossible-to-break-into safe room.)

There are plenty of other random asides that don’t add up, too. Like, why is there a Low-Orbit Police Station hovering literally next door to the MS-One? It’s not like there are apartment buildings up there in space that we’ve seen in need of protecting and serving, so why a precinct of – not lab technicians, astronauts, or even Marines – but, police officers? Other than to have a home base for Langral and Snow’s other CIA pal Sgt. Al Powell Shaw (Lennie James), of course. And why do Marine space fighters look and move like Last Starfighters? And why is the big joke about Snow’s first name the exact same joke from Sylvester Stallone’s 1986 masterpiece Cobra?

Clearly, directors and co-writers James Mather and Stephen St. Leger love themselves some action schlock. I don’t fault them for that one bit. In my opinion, we need more movies like Lockout in the world: blatant, unpretentious actioners set in space. I just hope, in the future, that they’re made a bit better than this one.