Lockout by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

Actors

• Guy Pearce
• Maggie Grace
• Peter Stormare
• Vincent Regan
• Joseph Gilgun

Format

• AC-3
• Closed-captioned
• Color
• Dolby
• Subtitled

Editorial Review

A hostage crisis–in orbit!–allows writer-producer Luc Besson (The Transporter, Taken) to spin yet another of his irresistibly pulpy action flicks: Lockout tosses a disgraced secret agent (Guy Pearce) into the middle of a space station/prison that houses the planet's worst criminals. Oh, and by the way, the key hostage in the inmate rampage just happens to be the daughter (Maggie Grace) of the US president, visiting the facility for an official visit that spirals into a major malfunction. It goes without saying that Pearce's badass is a cynical, wisecracking jerk, with an intro scene that sets up his character in a hilariously visceral way. And sure, you can say this movie borrows liberally from the likes of Escape from New York and Die Hard and countless others, and that the characters are stock figures, and you'd be right. But the plot is tight and simple, the setting adds a nice wrinkle, and the muscled-up Pearce is just offbeat enough to lay gleeful claim to the overly familiar role. The bad guys, too, are truly loathsome (most of them have British accents, which makes them seem like refugees from a Guy Ritchie picture). Lockout isn't rocket science, but its spritzy B-movie energy is undeniable, and on those terms it operates more than adequately. –Robert Horton