Luc Besson is a genius filmmaker and a completely inept, blundering producer. Besson has directed such masterworks as the The Big Blue, Leon and Angel-A as well as produced over 100 ill-fated movies, many of which he also wrote. Several of these are quite awful (Unleashed, District 13: Ultimatum, Revolver) with a few exceptions (Taken, High Tension). Still, I love his passion for the future and his odd idiosyncrasies for design and cinematography.
I will make a quick note - I believe in the auteur theory 100%. If you didn't have that one special persona like Kubrick or Kurosawa behind the film, it would seemingly not be close to the artistic level the resulting movie they produce attains. This though, is not to say that the other 100's of people that work on a film are not immensely important - they are - and sometimes on near equal status with the director, like for instance, possibly Bergman and Nykvist or Kar Wai and Doyle. So, in-so-much that this is true, when I use a director's name, I am singling him out as a single artist but still wish to acknowledge the team behind him. So I use one name, Besson, to represent Luc Besson as an individual and generally the team of greatly talented people that work for and with him.
Lockout, to get back to it, is a terrible film produced by Luc Besson. It has action, outer space, a hot president's daughter, deranged sociopaths, explosions and even comedy - sounds promising for the guy in all of us - but alas, Lockout suffers from terrible writing, delivery, acting, special effects, distorted reality, direction, editing etc etc.
In one scene, Guy Pearce escapes from a hotel room and hops on a motorcycle from the future - the effects honestly look like a video game - kinda cool special effects but not really. At one point Pearce and Maggie Grace go from falling though Low Earth Orbit (outer effing space) in space suits, to tumbling into earth's atmosphere all the way down to the highway, faster than a speeding bullet apparently, to land safely somehow, not burning up over a 200+ mile decent. The lack of ingenuity in space gadgets and and cell phones of the future fails to meet the mark. Yet they want us to believe that one of the first things, we as people of the world, will build in the next 70 years of space exploration, is a hellish prison in the sky which would probably cost trillions (for only 500 inmates by the way) and spacesuits that look the same as contemporaneous ones but somehow the cloth spacesuits!! don't burn up in the atmosphere?! Please treat the future with more respect. Go back to high school and put this celluloid on the bunsen burner.
Recommended Viewing: The Big Blue - The 5th Element - Sunshine (2007)
Bob Scale: Objective: 4.5 - Subjective: 5.0
MetaCritic: 47
Rotten Tomatoes: 29
IMDB: 6.8
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