LOCKOUT

This movie is a missed opportunity, a blown chance to craft a throwback 80's style action flick.  Guy Pearce is overdue for a starring role like this, and he fully commits himself to the schlocky premise and hammy one liners, but ultimately the movie somehow feels like less than the sum of its parts.  We have a cynical, sarcastic, reluctant hero (hell, he's not reluctant he's downright unwilling and openly hostile) framed for espionage and then recruited for a hopeless one-man-against-an-army mission to rescue the president's daughter (Maggie Grace) from a prisoner takeover at space jail.  This movie really should have been better.

There's no better example of what's wrong with the movie than the muted, bland performance delivered by Peter Stormare.  This is a movie about that might as well be called The Adventures of Marion Snow: Escape From Space Jail and yet Stormare wants to blend in with the Ikea furnishings decorating most scenes.  Every chance to inject some color (literal or metaphorical) in the film is squandered.  The villains are a stalwart Scotsman (I think... future accents are tricky) and his deranged, incomprehensible little brother but their mayhem is mostly limited by the PG-13 rating.

I call it Space Jail instead of its actual name MS One: Maximum Security Prison but the name isn't that far fetched.  Several scenes take place somewhere called the Low Orbit Police Department which seems to be a satellite full of uniformed stereotypical desk cops, drinking coffee and carrying around clipboards.  Well at least that's a real set.  Too many other locations are CGI messes that never quite look real or even seem interesting.  How could Space Jail be boring?  Its not fair really.

There's a second plot, also boring, happening underneath and around the main one.  It's another underdeveloped, dashed off tangent about a mole, this one with double crosses, dead mentors, magic briefcases, hidden microchips and a coded coffee cup.  This film should have followed the example of one of the films its clearly aping Escape From New York.  That film was originally to open with a bank heist led by Snake Plissken establishing his badass nature and why he was in prison but they decided to axe the sequence and just begin the film with him in prison.  So instead of this, just watch Escape From New York.

~ Somebody gets shot with a net gun in this movie.  I'm a sucker for net guns.  Luc Besson produced this film, and his directorial magnum opus The Fifth Element also features a net gun (and a peculiar emphasis on cigarettes and matches in a futuristic society).

~ Its way too easy in space jail to find the button that opens every cell at once.

~ One sequence captures the absurd tone that the whole film should have aimed for: skydiving from space and landing on a freeway.