MOVIE REVIEWS: LOCKOUT

The French-made (produced and co-written by Luc Besson) English-language Lockout is arriving without a single positive review from a critic at a major-market newspaper. It is, writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, “as dopey an entertainment as imaginable.” However, she allows, “it’s also a reminder that the film’s star, Guy Pearce, has always had great screen magnetism. … Also, he can act.” Scott Bowles in USA Today wants to know what such a fine actor was “doing anywhere near Lockout, a putrid film that comes dead-weighted with hammy one-liners and a plot so silly it borders on comedy.” How silly? Well, Kyle Smith in the New York Post, who uses the adjective “cheesy” twice in his review to describe it, writes that “it’s the kind of movie where someone tumbling in space above the earth’s atmosphere opens a parachute and lands gently on earth without even gasping for a breath.” Several critics remark that it’s simply a remake of 1981’s Escape from New York. “They’re just calling the thing Lockout and setting it in outer space,” writes Tom Russo in the Boston Globe. (He awards three stars to the movie, but it’s hard to figure out from his 340-word review what he liked about it.) A “blatant ripoff” of the earlier movie is the way Joe Neumaier describes it in the New York Daily News. Actually, writes Betsy Sharkey in the Los Angeles Times, “Lockout is lost in space.” Perhaps the best review of the lot is a ho-hummer from Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle, who remarks that “most of the time Lockout is pleasant enough, not something to recommend to a friend, but enjoyable in the moment.”