Starring: Guy Pearce, Maggie Grace and Peter Stormare
Rating: Three stars out of five
The movies have a new action star, one who first made his name playing a transvestite.
With his delicate, almost girlish features, Guy Pearce seemed perfectly cast as a drag queen in the 1994 film, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. It was a role that followed him for years, rather like a half-forgotten feather boa: He seemed too sensitive for tough-guy roles, like the straight-shooter cop in L.A. Confidential, but he had no trouble selling his weak-willed Edward VIII in The King's Speech.
Now, in the entertainingly cheesy sci-fi thriller Lockout, Guy has become, well, a guy. He plays Snow, a pumped-up wise-cracker who has to take on 500 psychopathic futuristic convicts, not to mention the entire American intelligence establishment, and also get the girl. He does it by virtue of big biceps and a ready quip: Priscilla's Felicia Jollygoodfellow has turned into Bruce Willis.
Set in 2079, Lockout begins with a complicated intelligence doublecross that has gone wrong, resulting in Snow being arrested and roughly questioned. He puts a cigarette in his mouth, launches an insouciant insult, gets whacked in the face, and pops back up with a broken cigarette. "I guess that's why they call it a punch line," he says.
Yes, he's one of those; indeed, he's several of them. Lockout is reminiscent of Escape from New York, in which Kurt Russell plays a convict who has to rescue the American president. This time around, the target is a president's daughter, Emilie (Lost's Maggie Grace), who is visiting an outer-space prison colony where the convicts are put into induced comas. She's there to make sure they're not being mistreated -- and in fact, the place looks like the warren of sleeping cells from The Matrix, so they probably are -- but things go wrong, as things tend to do, and suddenly all the prisoners are awake and free and Emilie is among their hostages.
Chief among the dangerous criminals is Hydell (Joseph Gilgun), a skinny, leering Scotsman with one bad eye and half a bad brain: He's in for rape, and when he gets a look at Emilie -- perhaps the sexiest First Daughter ever to occupy the White House -- he smiles most repulsively.
Hydell is kept in check by Alex (Vincent Regan), the toughest of the convicts -- and another Scot; Lockout has a bit of Trainspotting-in-Outer-Space about it -- but Hydell remains a constant threat.
The only thing to do, then, is to dispatch Snow in a space shuttle, vanquish the prisoners, and rescue Emilie with his combination of derring-do and casual self-regard. "Are you just thrilled being you the whole day, or is it a part-time job?" Emilie inquires at first meeting, a sure sign that love is in the air, even if it needs an oxygen mask. For his part, Snow tempers his invincibility with the typical failure of male brashness: "I know exactly what I'm doing," he says, as a door closes to reveal the fact that he's locked them into a high-radiation area.
Lockout is a project of Luc Besson, a sci-fi visionary (The Fifth Element) who makes a habit of discovering young talent. He found Irish directors James Mather and Stephen St. Leger on the Internet, through their short, "Prey Alone," and while Lockout features somewhat prosaic special effects, it has a nice galloping pace made up of one-third complicated techno-chases through the space prison and two-thirds wisecracks.
Unfortunately, it all sort of fritters away near the end: The expected final showdown never really comes, and an epilogue that wraps up the doublecross is an anticlimax. But Pearce and Grace make a winning couple in a film that never takes itself too seriously. How could it?
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