The marketing department for this futuristic action flick would dearly love critics to describe it as Die Hard in space. Or, failing that, Escape From New York – in space.
Producer Luc Besson has, after all, gone to the trouble of making Guy Pearce’s smart-ass ex-CIA operative Snow so laconic that you can hardly fail to mistake him for a distant relative of John McClane or Snake Plissken. He then traps him in a contained area (experimental space prison MS-One) with a bunch of heavily armed whackjobs (escaped inmates) and a presidential package to rescue (Maggie Grace’s First Daughter).
So far, so killer B-movie. Unfortunately, there’s also half a dozen half-baked conspiracy sub-plots locked in there with them. By the time executive orders relieve the president of power, you realise it’s not Die Hard in space, it’s 24 in space – all 24 episodes. And what begins lean and mean bloats into incoherence.
Still, Dublin-based writing/directing team James Mather and Stephen St Leger largely make a decent fist of their debut. One highway chase scene looks like it was knocked up with a laptop but, otherwise, the DIY SFX pass muster. And, largely thanks to a sneakily camp Pearce, there’s welcome humour – even if 50 per cent of the one-liners are more try hard than Die Hard.
Read more: http://www.metro.co.uk/film/reviews/896678-lockout-tries-hard-to-be-seen-as-die-hard-in-space-but-crashes-and-burns#ixzz1sc0pReOc
