Lockout

When I was in high school, I liked a lot of movies that I'm sure aren't as good as I remember them to be.  Yester-Holly thought they were great, but I'm not sure if that's true.  While watching Lockout, I was reminded of those movies.  Actually, the previews alone warned me of what type of movie I was in for, so I let Yester-Holly out of her cage to see the movie last night.  This resulted in Lockout being a whole lot of fun.

When the movie ended, Mark immediately started complaining about this movie being Escape from Space, and when the movie first started, that was exactly how I felt.  Guy Pearce is a great actor, but he was channeling Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken.  When you factor in the movie's plot, you can't help but see the similarities.  Fortunately, I was able to move past that.  Mark, however, was not.  It bothered him throughout the entire film.  I set it aside after the first fifteen or twenty minutes.

While there were similarities to the Plissken series, some of the overall characterizations were vastly different.  I enjoyed Pearce in this role, and he did a good job.  The villains of the piece also performed well.  The story was pretty generic, with the expected plot twists and lies sprinkled throughout.  It was like watching those awesome Bruckheimer films from the mid-nineties.  For me, that nostalgia was enough to let me enjoy the movie.

This does not mean I wasn't aware of the multitude of problems the film was sporting.  Engaging actors and spunky dialogue aren't enough to blind me to some of the poor choices made when creating the film.  The problems just weren't enough to make me hate the movie.

Some of the shots are edited together in such a way that the action becomes nigh impossible to follow.  There is a sequence early on in the film that utilizes some CGI and quick cuts, which knocked me right out of the film.  The CGI looked terrible, but I'm not sure if it was intentional to imply great speeds.  The quick cuts caused me to lose track of what was going on.  While I'm smart enough to piece it together, it was jarring.

For the viewers who demand realism from their films, there is a sequence at the end that is just ridiculously unbelievable.  I'm pretty sure "science" and "facts" may have been dirty words when putting together this movie.  Suspension of disbelief is necessary to enjoy a film, but some films ask for too much.  Lockout crosses that line at the end.

If it weren't for the feeling that I was watching some awesome movie from my teen years, I probably would have been much harder on Lockout.  It's not a great film, but I had fun watching it.  It is, however, forgettable.  While I still remember lines from the Rock and feel compelled to put Armageddon on as background noise, I don't' expect to be re-watching Lockout.