LOCKOUT (2012) Review

Directed by: James Mather, Stephen St. Leger

Starring: Guy Pearce, Maggie Grace, Joseph Gilgun

Apparently somewhere along the line, somebody decided it would be a great idea to take ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, replace Kurt Russell with Guy Pearce and set it in space. And thus LOCKOUT was born.

In space there is a giant orbiting prison known as MS One, which houses around 500 or so prisoners. Luckily these prisoners are all frozen in stasis, so there is no possible way for them to escape. Right? Wrong. The US President's daughter Emilie (Grace) visits MS One to conduct an investigation into how the prisoners are being treated and whether the stasis has any adverse effects on them. During an interview with one inmate somebody makes the stupid decision to bring a gun along, things go bad and soon every prisoner on board is free. Enter Snow (Pearce), an ex-government agent who has been falsely convicted, and his only chance at freedom is to infiltrate the space prison and rescue Emilie. Simple. There is some subplot involving a briefcase but basically that's the story in a nutshell. The bulk of the film involves Snow and Emilie skillfully evading the prisoners, running through closing doors just in the nick of time and displaying every cliche of every sci-fi/action movie ever. 

You will learn a lot from LOCKOUT too, for example:

Did you know that's it actually pretty easy to convince the President of the US to send in a single man instead of an experienced team of soldiers to free his daughter from a maximum security space prison filled with 500 violent and murderous inmates?

Did you know that futuristic space prisons have a special, easy to use button which unlocks the cells of every single inmate, and said button doesn't even seem to have a password or anything?

Did you know that the phrase "No guns while interrogating the prisoner" roughly translates to "Please bring a gun while interrogating the prisoner"?

Did you know that instead of spending millions of dollars on heat shielding, all you need to enter the Earth's atmosphere is a yellow suit?
I think you get the picture now.

If you haven't already figured it out, LOCKOUT is the kind of brainless action film that might not be original and is far from a masterpiece, but it is at least entertaining. If you're content on not having to think too hard or try and figure out where the movie is going (it's pretty damn predictable) then you can easily sit down and watch this and not regret it too much afterwards. As you might expect there are a lot of explosions, gunfire, average acting, laughable dialogue and over the top action scenes. Just as a side note about the acting though, I actually thought that Joseph Gilgun did a great job as the insane prisoner Hydell and was probably the most impressive actor in the film. The effects for the most part are good, however there is one scene near the beginning which has some horrible looking CGI.