A former government agent, Snow (Guy Pearce) who has been falsely convicted of a crime has been offered his freedom in return for heading into space to a prison colony on a secret mission. It seems the president’s daughter has been abducted by the rebel prisoners, and is being held as a prisoner. Snow has to go fight this most deadly enemy and get her back safely.

Think “Rambo in Space”. This film didn’t ring my chimes. It didn’t seem to server any great purpose. Prisoner’s revolt, government is too scared to deal with them, so they take some guy who was falsely arrested and send him out to do their dirty work. He is a bad-ass and kicks a lot of but, burns a lot of bullets, and does the hero thing. Ho-hum. This has been done over and over again. There just isn’t anything new or interesting at all in this film. It could be an incredibly violent and bloody battle movie, but to get the PG-13 they cleaned all that up quite a bit. As a result, it’s just not very interesting at all. Mostly it’s just hero Rambo-like stuff for scene after scene after scene. Guy Pearce, although he seems like a pretty decent guy, does not have the charisma to carry this off, and this film just sat there and smoldered for an hour and a half with not flame. I just didn’t get into it. I’ve read reviews of people who liked it, so it might be up someone’s alley, but not mine. I felt it was a waste of my time, and I didn’t really get into it at all.

EdG – EdsReview Dot Com – A Movie Review Blog

==Written by Ed Goettman ==

==From: Ed's Review Dot Com (www.edsreview.com)==

There’s no delicate way to put this, and no reason to dig much deeper: “Lockout” is a cheap, ugly, barely competent ripoff on John Carpenter's “Escape from New York,” only this time the prison is in outer space. Its sole saving grace is a hammy, knowing performance by Guy Pearce as Snow, a lovably grumpy smart aleck badass who has to infiltrate Space Jail to rescue the President’s daughter (Maggie Grace), who’s been taken hostage by the revolting inmates. Un-ironically boasting the credit “Based on an original idea by Luc Besson,” “Lockout” stumbles from one blandly expository dialogue scene to the next, most of them apparently shot in the same three nondescript “Generic Sci-Fi Gray Metal Room #4” sets, occasionally interrupting them for a completely incoherent close-up shaky-cam fistfight.

Onscreen text constantly informs us of our present location, several times even going so far so to note that we’re in the same exact place as the immediately previous scene. A nighttime motorcycle chase is literally indistinguishable from a video-game cutscene. One of the few barely legible action sequences only works as such because it’s a zero-gravity fistfight, eliminating the need for what little spacial clarity the directors (yes, it took two of them) can muster. A secret service agent locks himself and the First Daughter in a room then inexplicably and deliberately shorts out the air supply, before killing himself to provide her with air. Scene after scene of total nonsense. Pearce is the only bright spot. Clearly modeled on Kurt Russell’s iconic Snake Plissken, the antihero of each of Carpenter’s 'Escape' films, Snow is a wisecracking loner who hides his incredible skill behind crummy putdowns and a hilariously laconic inability to appear surprised. He’s so much fun to watch here that you’ll find yourself wishing he’d simply get up and leave, leading you by the arm into a different movie.

As a sidenote, it’s possible that “Lockout” intends to strike up a subtle commentary on a liberal outlook toward prisoners' rights. Grace is on a fact-finding mission regarding the safety of the cryo-stasis used to keep the inmates asleep (safe or not, that hardly seems like a worthwhile punishment). One has to wonder what the cost/benefit is on shipping tens of thousands of people into outer space; surely that can’t be cheaper, or more efficient than, say, an underground prison. But these cursory ideas, if they were ever there in the first place, are wiped away by a film in which one can parachute safely to Earth from upper orbit. Nitpicking this crap for plausibility is just as lazy as labeling it a “Fun B-movie,” but just because something is cheap doesn’t mean it’s allowed to be actively shitty (as if a substantial budget should any longer be considered a barometer for quality or potential). “Lockout” fits nicely into the recent wave of Intentionally Terrible Films, so called “faux-Grindhouse” movies, created by people who have no idea of, or interest in, what a real exploitation film is capable of being.

==Written by Matt Lynch==

==From: In Review Online (www.inreviewonline.com)==

Studio: Warnervision Release Date: 09/30/2008 Rating: Nr