Lockout

The mononymous character of Snow, as played by Australian actor Guy Pearce, is the 21st century’s answer to Snake Plissken. Both characters, the former headlining newly released sci-fi actioner “Lockout” and the latter played by Kurt Russell in John Carpenter’s 1981 cult classic “Escape from New York,” are former government agents turned apparent crooks who are offered a one-man suicide mission to the pits of Hell by the United States government in exchange for the pardoning of their various crimes. Very much the antiheroes of their respective films, they’re both stuck on “smartass” mode, both highly skilled in the art of kicking butt, both heavy smokers and both spouting wise-cracks like a Tourette syndrome sufferer spouts four-letter words.

The only real differences between the pair are that while Kurt Russell was quiet and spoke (or snarled) only when necessary, Guy Pearce can’t keep his mouth shut, and Pearce, as opposed to Russell, isn’t sporting an eyepatch, perhaps because sharing such a striking physical attribute would clearly be one similarity too much. Both are also great characters, but while Snake Plissken had the pleasure of being a great character in a great movie, Snow has the displeasure of being a great character in a bad movie, although admittedly he doesn’t really seem to give a hoot.

We are introduced to Snow as he is being ruthlessly interrogated by Scott Langral (Peter Stormare, “Constantine”), the slimy chief of the Secret Service, in the year 2097. Snow, a former secret agent, has been taken into custody on suspicion of murdering a working agent, although he claims to be completely innocent. During the course of the interrogation, he refuses to answer questions seriously, snapping back with quip after quip, all the while having his head repeatedly thumped by the knuckles of a muscle-bound brute named Rupert. “I’m being beaten up by a guy named Rupert?” Snow queries.

Snow is handed life imprisonment, but a chance for freedom arises. You see, the President’s daughter, Emilie Warnock (Maggie Grace, “Taken”), has gotten herself in a bit of a pickle. While visiting a space prison in which the inmates are cryogenically frozen, one rebellious jailbird escapes custody and unfreezes his fellow prisoners, starting a riot that results in hostages being taken captive and demands for freedom being sent down to Earth. Snow is given an option: go up into space and rescue the President’s daughter from the murderous convicts, or go to jail. He reluctantly chooses the former, but only because one of the inmates on the space prison knows the location of a briefcase Snow needs to prove his innocence.

“Lockout” is a B-movie with a budget - a $20 million budget, in fact, although you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise: the CGI used in one car chase sequence coming five minutes into the film is so ghastly it looks like a cut-away sequence from a decade-old PS2 video game, and one where the analog stick controlling the viewer’s perspective is stuck at a dodgy angle, resulting in a dizzying display of dodgy computer graphics spinning relentlessly and randomly, possibly in a desperate attempt to cover up the crappy effects - it doesn’t work.

The script, written by the film’s first-time directors, James Mather and Stephen St. Leger, along with action aficionado Luc Besson (“Leon"), isn’t any less dizzying. Sprinting and leaping along at the pace of a “Star Wars" podracer, it certainly gets down to business pretty darn quickly, but unfortunately is utterly inept at shaping and constructing a fluid narrative, instead creating a non-narrative that is essentially just a muddled series of things happening, none of which particularly stand out as significant when they are required to be; the beginning of the all-important prison riot, for example, barely has any impact whatsoever.

What the script does provide, however, is a plethora of mostly witty one-liners for Pearce to churn out, and churn them out he does, in predictably magnificent fashion. Channeling the aforementioned Kurt Russell and also Bruce Willis (in his “Die Hard” days), Pearce spends much of the film crawling through air ducts, floating above spinning turbines and cracking jokes about people’s mothers, all while chewing space scenery and loving every cheesy chunk of it. Pearce’s joy is almost contagious, especially in the scenes he shares with a sassy Maggie Grace, but remember something: not even Kurt Russell in all his Snake Plissken glory could save “Escape from L.A.” from sinking into the abyss.

As head villain Alex we have an impressive Vincent Regan (“Clash of the Titans”), playing a scar-faced, instinctively commanding Scottish inmate who almost immediately takes control of the prison revolt. But it’s Alex’s rapist brother Hydell who’s really interesting: as played by Joseph Gilgun (“This is England”), Hydell is an absolute nutjob. Fitted with a glass eye, a scarred face, a thick Scottish brogue and a gold-toothed grin, he would easily pass for a Looney Tunes villain, had it not been for the whole rapist angle. Gilgun, an extraordinary talent, fully indulges in the unhinged madness of his character, but does so too much, resulting in a villain that is little more than an unbelievable cartoon character; one suspects Mather and Leger didn’t have the sense to tell him to tone it down a little, or perhaps Gilgun was simply doing what they told him to do. Either way, his boundless lunacy tends to be grating, much as Gilgun commendably throws himself into the role.

“Lockout” is fast-food space junk; emphasis on “fast” and “junk.” Essentially “Escape from New York” combined with “Con Air” and hurled into space with a little “Mission: Impossible” thrown in, it is a film that sounds significantly more entertaining than it actually is. Guy Pearce is utterly spell-binding as our cigarette-chomping action antihero, but shoddy special effects and a narratively challenged screenplay bring this overblown sci-fi B-movie crashing down to Earth.

4/10