{"id":2399,"date":"2012-04-14T22:47:43","date_gmt":"2012-04-15T04:47:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=2399"},"modified":"2012-04-14T22:47:43","modified_gmt":"2012-04-15T04:47:43","slug":"cheese-whiz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=2399","title":{"rendered":"Cheese Whiz"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nONE can always count on European movie magnate Luc Besson to inject an international flavour into action-filled screen projects.
\nIn Lockout, the French producer of Taken and Transporter gives us an Aussie leading man sent into space by a Swede to rescue an American woman from a pair of fiendish Scots.
\nThe result? A derivative yet expensive copy of a cheap yet inventive all-American B-movie.
\nThe obvious template of Lockout is John Carpenter’s Escape from New York with the unlikely choice of Australian actor Guy Pearce standing in for Snake Plissken. Pearce plays Snow, some kind of savvy intelligence operative of the future, set up to take the rap for killing a fellow agent and stealing a valuable attache case.
\nCaught and convicted without a trial, Snow is designated for a term in an outer space prison facility where inmates are frozen in cryogenic chambers for their sentences. Fortunately for him (but unfortunately for the world), a visit by the U.S. president’s daughter Emilie (Maggie Grace, also the damsel in distress in Taken) has initiated a mass prison breakout in the satellite-slammer. Snow is recruited to save the situation, which becomes all the more dire when an intelligent Scottish inmate named Alex (Vincent Regan) figures out who Emilie is and intends to use her as a bargaining chip to negotiate his way to Earth, if he can just keep her from the clutches of the drooling psycho (and fellow Scot) Hydell (Joseph Gilgun), the guy who initiated the breakout.
\nAt the same time Snow attempts to keep Emilie out of harm’s way, he is also intent on finding one of the facility’s inmates who can prove his innocence.
\nBesson gave directors\/co-screenwriters James Mather and Stephen St. Leger lots of high-tech resources that Carpenter could have only imagined when he made Escape back in 1981. There are space walks, zero-gravity fight scenes and huge digital techno-scapes.
\nBut this is thin gruel anyway. Besson apparently opted to go for a PG-13 rating in the U.S., sacrificing toughness for fairly lightweight action.
\nPearce, buffed into action hero shape, is amusing but he never quite inhabits the role. One problem: Snow is verbose and constantly cracking wise where he really should have taken a tip from Snake and stayed a man of few words.
\nApparently, this movie’s true progenitor is the ill-considered 1996 sequel Escape from L.A., which saw Snake Plissken sent to the post-apocalyptic left coast to retrieve not the president but the president’s daughter, in a movie filled with cheesy special effects and hackneyed comic hijinks.
\nIs it possible Luc Besson, seized by the same contrarian French sensibility that saw Jerry Lewis win the L\u00e9gion d’honneur, saw it and considered it the true masterpiece?
\nLockout may answer that question.
\nrandall.king@freepress.mb.ca
\nOther Voices
\nSelected excerpts from reviews of Lockout.
\nCavalierly conceived, generically titled and derivatively plotted. It feels like a missed chance because Pearce and Grace came ready to play.
\n— Jake Coyle, Associated Press
\nWitty one-liners compensate for clich\u00e9d plotting and cheesy effects in this sci-fi action thriller.
\n— Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter
\nAt a certain point, the pic’s unpretentious B-movie style, like its generic and uninformative title, seems to indicate a simple lack of ambition.
\n— Justin Chang, Variety
\nBig dumb fun is the chief objective of Lockout, so it’s a pity that this sci-fi action flick only consistently delivers on two-thirds of its promise.
\n— Tim Grierson, Screen International
\nThe committee product of newbie directors James Mather, Stephen St. Leger, and producer Luc Besson, Lockout is, not unexpectedly, a potluck of derivative references.
\n— Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice
\nLockout is a largely half-hearted effort in which some of the major set pieces are so indifferently executed that they literally look exactly like sequences out of video games.
\n— Glenn Kenny, MSN Movies
\nLockout is the kind of manly nonsense no one wants to make anymore.
\n— Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out New York
\nWho cares about subpar computer-generated work when Guy Pearce is a one-man cartoon badass spectacle all to himself?
\n— Nick Schager, Slant magazine
\n— Compiled by Shane Minkin
\nMovie Review
\nLockout
\nStarring Guy Pearce and Maggie Grace
\nSt. Vital
\n14A
\n95 minutes
\none and a half stars out of five
\nRepublished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 13, 2012 D8
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