Lockout

Starring Guy Pierce, Maggie Grace

Directed by James Mather, Stephen St. Leger

Written by James Mather, Stephen St. Leger

Rated PG-13

Released in 2012

Running time 1 hour 35 minutes

I like to give people the benefit of the doubt. Surely Hollywood studios wouldn't agree to fund a movie that sounded stupid, so when I see a truly bad movie like Lockout, I wonder at what point it actually sounded good.

The film isn't terribly original. A prison riot ends with our heroine (Maggie Grace) a hostage of brutal killers, and so the government sends in a lone operative (Guy Pierce) to get her out. The only minor twists on this are the fact that the movie takes place in the (too-near to be believable) future, where the prison in question is in orbit, and the heroine is none other than the First Daughter. But take those away and you are left with a paint-by-numbers shoot-em-up that you've probably seen dozens of times.

What really grated me, though, wasn't so much the pedantic story. It wasn't even the acting, which clearly came across as being done by people who were aware they were making a bad film and just wanted to get it over with. No, what was a real problem was that the movie consistently insults the audience's intelligence with its lazy writing. Rather than introduce the characters through dialog or actions, they take the easy route of displaying graphics onscreen with the characters' stats. Of course, we know it's "the future" because the display is blue and staticy, even though we all know that as we move forward with computers, displays are getting clearer. Then, we have an establishing shot of the prison-in-space, which they identify with an onscreen graphic again. I can almost forgive that one, but it was one case where they were introducing it with dialog, so really, the graphic was merely saying, "we think that you in the audience aren't smart enough to figure out that what we're showing now is what we're talking about, so here's some text." But it gets even better than that, because the filmmakers repeat that identifying text for the prison for each of the first five or six times it's shown, before aburptly stopping. So it was either that they really think their audience is so dumb that they need to be reminded again and again what the main set for the movie is, or they were so lazy as to just keep reusing the same shot. Either way, they should be ashamed of themselves.

• Lockout
• Cabin in the Woods
• Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
• American Reunion
• Jeff, Who Lives at Home
• Wrath of the Titans
• Friends with Kids
• The Hunger Games
• John Carter
• Gone

• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
• The Artist
• Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
• Cabin in the Woods
• Project X
• John Carter
• Jeff, Who Lives at Home
• The Hunger Games
• Wrath of the Titans
• Act of Valor