Movie Review: ‘Lockout’

While Lockout will definitely be locked out of next year’s Oscar-running, it would be a cheap shot to call it cheap entertainment.
Movie Review: ‘Lockout’
Maggie Grace and Guy Pearce in the science fiction action-thriller 'Lockout,' a film about a wrongly convicted man who is offered freedom if he can save the president’s daughter from an outer-space prison. Open Road Films
Mark Jackson
Mark Jackson
Film Critic
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<a href="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/07/Lockout1.jpg"><img class="size-large wp-image-218949" title="Lockout1" src="https://www.theepochtimes.com/assets/uploads/2015/07/Lockout1-668x450.jpg" alt="" width="590" height="397"/></a>

If you loved Aliens,  Battlestar Galactica,  Blade Runner, Die Hard, Mission Impossible, Pulp Fiction, Robocop, Speed, and Star Wars, chances are that the fairly inappropriately PG-13 rated Lockout might also interest you. It’s a piecemeal work of all of the above. The chances are, also, that you might therefore find it to be thoroughly clichéd and utterly predictable. But it’s not boring. That’s largely thanks to Guy Pearce.

The year is 2079. Pearce plays buff, tough, terminally wisecracking CIA agent Snow, who gets bogusly framed for alleged espionage against the U.S. He’s headed out to serve a 30-year sentence in a cryogenic deep-freeze pod on a satellite-like maximum-security prison in outer space, called MS ONE.

The president of the United States’ daughter (Maggie Grace), visiting MS ONE to determine the state of its humaneness, is taken hostage in a prison riot. The inmates have requests and conditions or they'll forcibly eject a hostage out of the airlock every 3 minutes. Oops.

Mark Jackson
Mark Jackson
Film Critic
Mark Jackson is the chief film critic for The Epoch Times. In addition to film, he enjoys martial arts, motorcycles, rock-climbing, qigong, and human rights activism. Jackson earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Williams College, followed by 20 years' experience as a New York professional actor. He narrated The Epoch Times audiobook "How the Specter of Communism is Ruling Our World," available on iTunes, Audible, and YouTube. Mark is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic.
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