Review - Lockout

Grade: C

Anyone with a passing familiarity of superhero movie development knows about Supermax, the Green Arrow vehicle that would drop the Batman knockoff into a prison filled with supervillains. Of course, anybody who knows about Supermax also knows that it has been stuck in development hell for years.  

Not content to let such a juicy story lay dormant, producer Luc Besson and co-conspirators James Mather and Stephen St. Leger devised Lockout as the answer to moviegoers who are either desperate for Supermax or just desperate for some old-fashioned B-movie hackery.

Sixty years in the future, where technology has obviously advanced so quickly that the world has finally become the set of Blade Runner, ex-CIA operative, professional asshole, and new member of the one-named icon club, Snow, played by the under appreciated but never underrated Guy Pearce—seriously when is this guy going to blow up in America—has been caught by some shady Secret Service heavies, led by Peter Stormare’s gravelly Langral, after being framed for the murder of a former CIA partner. Convicted without any sniff of a fair trial, Snow is sentenced to 30 years on space station prison, MS-1, where prisoners are turned into Matrix batteries for the duration of their term. Just before Snow is shipped off, First Daughter, Emilie Warnock (Maggie Grace), makes a jaunt to the Supermax in the Sky to see if prisoners are being treated fairly in a prison where they are frozen and effectively mindwiped for decades. A piece of hell breaks loose when Misfits star Joseph Gilgun’s creepy one-eyed convict gets the drop on Warnock’s entourage and proceeds to unfreeze hundreds of prisoners, including the shrewd Alex (Vincent Regan). With the President’s daughter trapped, Snow is offered a deal: infiltrate Ms-1, save the First Daughter, and walk free. All he has to do is make his way through a prison suspended thousands of miles above Earth’s orbit that is filled with the worst criminals alive. No problem.

From Lockout’s first scene, it’s clear that St. Leger and Mather have transposed a video game onto celluloid. The stench of cheap CGI is thick on this flick. St. Leger and Mather’s ADD editing distorts action into and endless stream whipping lights and any object with weight bends into a rubbery cartoon. It’s amazing Lockout wasn’t touted as a green screen production because that may have marginally improved its Q rating. While this approach renders most of the action in Lockout fairly devoid of substance and tension, St. Leger and Mather make up for it by keeping the pace quick. Lockout breezes breathlessly from scene to scene—you’re welcome for the pull quote. The pace saves the audience from thinking more deeply about the plot than Lockout’s creators did.  

St. Leger and Mather may not put their absolute best foot forward on Lockout, but at least some the cast tries to elevate the material. Pearce, unsurprisingly, proves generally effective as an even more dickish riff on Han Solo than the original as the rakish Snow. His self-centered antics are so pitched that audiences will either love the character or hate him, which is as much as an actor can ask from their audience. With so much of the film resting on Pearce’s shoulders the rest of the cast seem content to fulfill the guidelines of their respective archetypes. Grace is alternatively self-righteous and panicked then competent as the First Daughter. Stormare dials up the slime and slithers as shadowy Secret Service head Langral. Reagan and Gilgun scowl and twitch, respectively, as only classic B-grade villains can. Only Lennie James steps up and gives some depth and personality to his role as Snow’s nonplussed handler, Shaw.

The efforts of the cast and crew aside, Lockout is exactly the type of B—knocking on C—grade entertainment that thrives in January, which is surprising considering its release between one juggernaut—The Hunger Games—and a nuclear warhead—Avengers. Sadly, as theaters prepare to get glutted with summer blockbusters, Lockout will probably fall into oblivion, but not for lack of trying and succeeding at being the middling, forgettable slice of entertainment it was destined to be.

Yin: C-level direction and performances, with a few exceptions, and B-movie ethos as to be expected from Luc Besson’s film factory.  

Yang: Pearce and Shaw offer some solid, engaging performances that match the material, and the quick pacing keeps the proceedings from dragging unnecessarily.

In-Between: In the year 2012, should we even believe that world will change so significantly in the next 50-100 years that it will make some of the technology in these films anything other than pipe dreams? 

Review - Colombiana

Grade: C

Good: Action and sexiness, as promised; Amandla Stenberg as young Cataleya shows intelligence, capability and range that outdoes her older counterpart.

Bad: Blatantly contrived plotting; clichéd, underdeveloped characters; stock performances by actors who have all played these roles before; uninspired action and cheap, old fashioned exploitation.

Ugly: The aping of Tony Scott’s visual style

Zoe Saldana has been prepping for her role as aggrieved cartel princess Cataleya in Colombiana for a few years now. She started way back in 2003 with a minor role in the first Pirates move then escalated as she became the go-to action girl with roles as Uhura in the Star Trek reboot, Neytiri the Na’vi in Avatar and, more recently, as the enigmatic Aisha in The Losers. Now, Saldana is essentially taking her role as Aisha and stretching it across an hour and a half feature. Sadly, the Losers aren't around to support her, and, boy, does she need them.

Oliver Megaton’s (seriously? Transformers are directing now?) Colombiana harkens back to the good old days of exploitation cinema with nonsensical plotting, an unequivocally badass heroine who is unafraid to deliver dirtnaps in her skivvies and, seemingly, copious amounts of bullets and explosions. Colombiana follows Cataleya Restrepo, the daughter of a Colombian cartel enforcer (Jesse Borrego) who turned state’s evidence on his employers and was promptly erased for his betrayal. Unfortunately, Cataleya witnessed her parent’s deaths firsthand—see Mr. Wayne, you're not the only one—as a child and is now possessed with a thirst for vengeance. After her parent’s death, Cataleya makes her way to Chicago, where her Uncle Emilio (Cliff Curtis) reluctantly schools her in the art of assassination. As an adult, Cataleya has become a proficient contract killer—22 kills to her name—who tags her killers with her namesake, a rare Colombian orchid. When Cataleya’s signature draws the attention of dogged FBI agent Ross (Lennie James), she finally gets close to drawing out the men who took her parents from her.

Colombiana is as much an exercise in exploitation as it is in inorganic plotting. Nothing in this movie, after the opening scenes, occurs without contrivance, and rarely is there an excuse for Saldana to do something while rocking a pair of pants. While I realize every piece of fiction is contrived, it’s incumbent on the creative talent to at least make it seem like it isn’t. On that point, Megaton and his team have failed. When ten-year old Cataleya starts free-running through the slums of Colombia—mind you, being pursued by Colombian freerunners, in 1992—the audience should know something’s amiss. Clearly, Megaton and crew thought they could splice together some loosely-connected action—filmed in the annoyingly hyperkinetic style of Tony Scott—over a toilet-paper-thin plot and sell it because the lead is hot. There’s no doubt in my mind this will sell, but it’s a shame nobody took the time to make this work because Colombiana could have been something more than just the sum of it's parts.

When the story isn’t following Cataleya as she exterminates random targets who are only tangentially attached to her main targets, it’s tracking her life as a cold detached assassin, which somehow both sucks and blows because it’s so boring and clichéd. Cataleya can’t have any attachments, not to her family or her “boyfriend”/sex buddy (Michael Vartan, as a clueless artist who is so bland and dense that it would be hard for anyone to be attached). All Cataleya does throughout the movie, is slither sexily—whether she’s randomly dancing in her apartment or showering or just walking down the block—and plan her hits, which are dishearteningly hands-off. There’s nothing about her that seems remotely human. That maybe Megaton and screenwriter Luc Besson’s—clearly trying to recapture the feel of his legendary La Femme Nikita, point—but it seems like they were trying to humanize her and couldn’t decide which way to go. As a result, Cataleya just doesn’t connect. It doesn’t help matters that her motivation is a bit tainted, as her father was clearly involved in the drug trade and probably wasn’t totally innocent. As such, there’s a degree of empathy that’s lost because how can an audience root for someone who is trying to avenge a cold-blooded killer. These types of questions will plague attentive audience members as they try to digest this hokum that looks like it was made on the same set as Tony Scott’s Domino back in ’05.

The performances in Colombiana barely help elevate the material because they’re so shallow and perfunctory. Saldana could likely play this role in her sleep, and to a degree it seems like she’s sleepwalking through this. If Cataleya had more depth there might be a challenge for Saldana to rise to, but as it stands all she does is saunter while either looking sad, sexy or angry. Conversely, Amandla Stenberg, who plays young Cataleya and looks like the one of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett's lost children, shows great restraint as a traumatized girl who is capable and smart while trying to deal with the shock without breaking down. The supporting cast, on the other hand, are vapors and cutouts. Lennie James’ Agent Ross is no revelation. He’s the same persistent soul who is smarter the average agent that has been done in every movie like this; however, those other agents didn’t have the added benefit of a magical supercomputer that can identify anybody in the world using a fraction of an image. Vartan again plays a dope with a taste for dangerous women who are clearly too good for him, doing so with his standard lack of emotion, charisma or charm. Cliff Curtis tries to throw some gravitas and humanity into his role as Cataleya’s uncle, but his moments are too short to register him as more than a dissenting, albeit concerned, voice. Cataleya’s chief target, Marco, is played by Jordi Molla who isn’t doing much more than rehashing his slimy drug dealer from Bad Boys II, leading me to believe that Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with this poor guy besides make him a drug lord. Curiously, there’s a dearth of female presence in this flick aside from Cataleya, which is odd in something that seemingly champions females as powerful and smart. I guess it would upset the balance to have this movie actually pass the Bechdel Test.

For all its faults, Colombiana succeeds on some level because it delivers what the trailers and ads promised. There’s a sexy, tough woman shooting suckers and blowing sh!* up. Truthfully, that’s probably all that’s expected of this, so on that level Megaton and his Decepticons have hit the mark. Unfortunately, the scenes of mass destruction are capped at the standard three per action movie and they're sandwiched between stretches of the aforementioned contrived plotting coupled with scant characterization. Sadly, everything about Colombiana is so uninspired that it’s hard to recommend this to anybody but an action movie virgin. So, for those who’ve never seen Saldana in an action flick and don’t mind a gaping disparity between weak plotting and some undercooked, over-edited action, Colombiana will deliver the basics, and nothing else.