Lockout

Okay, I realize that I'm probably the only person who actually went to the theatre and saw this movie last week, but you need to ask yourself, why? This movie was for all accounts and purposes Die Hard in space. Now you may be thinking we have all seen this before and it's the same old action cliches over and over again. You aren't completely wrong but it doesn't suffer what most failures at the box office do, it knows exactly what it is and who to cater too. Even with a fast mouthed script with plenty of action it just wasn't able to make over 6 mil. A death sentence for a film of this type, especially around this time. I would lay the blame on the marketing, I saw a few trailers here and there no question and they weren't bad but the message was getting buried by every other flick out there. If it was too crowded they should have moved the film, it would have done much better in August, but what are you going to do. You can't please the Movie Gods all the time and sometimes not at all.

Guy Pearce plays it fast and loose as a smart ass cocksure rogue with a stream of one-liners and no real desire to play the hero. Snow (Pearce) is given a chance to redeem himself after a covert op he was working on goes south and he is left with the blame. The daughter of the President (Maggie Grace) is held captive in a space prison filled with hardened criminals and Snow is tasked with breaking into the prison and getting her out alive.

So it's a little bit Die Hard and a lot Escape From N.Y., you could surely see Snake Plisskin or John McClane trying to wiggle their way out of this claptrap. The script wasn't bad honestly, it was a straight up action movie with some funny lines and some annoying hapless good guys who can't ever seem to do anything right, except of course the protagonist Snow. It's textbook Luc Besson, that guy must write these things in his sleep, and or studios just want to make every little thing he writes in his sleep. Either way Pearce was pitch perfect and kept my interest throughout even when the plotlines began to get predictable and a little stale. It made me wish they had picked him up for some larger scale action movie a long time ago. The guy is a leading man no question about it and it's kind of sad it took this movie to prove that point. The bad guys were pretty much one-note you had a crazy prisoner (Joseph Gilgun) and his less crazy brother (Vincent Regan). The crazy one feels like he came from Mad Max or something and he was the least interesting and most annoying of the group and it would have been nice if they had just thrown him out an airlock in the beginning but sadly he makes it almost all the way through. All of this nitpicking aside, it's a fun little action flick and if you enjoy movies like little action flicks like the Mechanic or big action flicks like Die Hard or Escape From NY then you'll probably get a smile and some enjoyment from this flick, that is until Avengers comes out.

Grade: 3 Buckets