Watching Pearce insult, mock, and blow up everyone who gets in his way is a delight.
By Joshua Tyler
| Published
Lockout begins with Guy Pearce being punched in the face. He’s playing an operative named Snow, and he’s unfazed by the blood dripping down his face. He’s rewarded for each of his witty retorts with another punch, but he keeps right on quipping, keeps right on taking those punches. 2012’s Lockout is that kind of action movie.
With a genius performance, Guy Pearce created one of the best action heroes since John McClane; unfortunately, he’s wasted in a mediocre prison-break movie that just happens to be set in outer space. Lockout could have been the next Escape from New York. Snow is everything you’d want in a modern-day Snake Plissken, but for most of its running time, Lockout fails to muster up the energy necessary to match its dynamic lead character.
In Space, No One Can Hear You Escape
The plot involves a maximum security prison floating in near-Earth orbit. Why keep a prison outside our atmosphere? It’s not to keep the inmates in check since all the prisoners are kept unconscious. That’s the biggest problem with Lockout: it’s set in outer space for no real reason other than that someone thought that might be fun. It doesn’t make much sense, but they were right; it is.
The prisoners find a way to regain consciousness and quickly seize control of their maximum-security space station. As luck would have it, the prison takeover coincides with an inspection by the president’s daughter (Maggie Grace). She’s quickly taken hostage. To get her out, they’ll need the craziest badass planet Earth has to offer, and as we’ve learned by watching a guy named Rupert punch him in the face, that’s definitely Snow.
Going Fast And Slow
Watching Guy Pearce insult, mock, and blow up everyone who gets in his way is a delight. Worth the price of admission. But as an action movie, sometimes Lockout doesn’t know what level it’s supposed to work at.
Some of it moves so blazingly fast that it’s almost impossible to follow what’s going on. A high-speed chase on Earth is reduced to a series of random blurs, probably to hide bad computer-generated FX, but whatever the reason, it’s a mess.
Up on the space station, things move more slowly and boil down to a lot of skulking around in air ducts. I really wish action movies would find something other than air ducts to use.
Guy Pearce Makes Lockout A Must-See
Pearce is electric, and the outer-space elements, when they’re moving at a reasonable speed, add an admittedly unnecessary but entirely fun secondary layer to what’s going on. With a little work, maybe this could have been the next Demolition Man; instead, it’s a mid-level action movie with an unforgettable character who keeps getting punched and then gets back up to quip again.
Mid-level or not, Lockout is worth watching for Guy Pearce. Those quips are dynamite.
Sued For Being Too Much Like A Great Movie
Lockout’s similarities to Escape From New York aren’t just my opinion; it’s the opinion of French courts. John Carpenter, Escape From New York co-writer Nick Castle, and rights holder StudioCanal sued in France, arguing that Luc Besson and EuropaCorp had plagiarized their film.
In 2015, a French court agreed and awarded €80,000 in damages, far below the roughly €3 million the plaintiffs had reportedly sought. Besson appealed, but in 2016 a Paris appeals court not only upheld the ruling, it increased the damages to €450,000, finding that Lockout had “massively borrowed key elements” from Carpenter’s 1981 film.
Besson’s side argued the movie was just working in familiar genre territory and that Escape From New York had influences of its own, but the court was not persuaded. It was a rare case where the usual “homage or rip-off?” debate around genre movies became an actual legal defeat.
Why Lockout Failed
At the box office, Lockout never found much traction. Released in April 2012 by Open Road Films, the movie opened to just over $6 million domestically and quickly disappeared from theaters, finishing its U.S. run with around $14 million. Worldwide grosses pushed it past $32 million against a reported budget in the neighborhood of $20 million, meaning it wasn’t a total financial disaster, but it also wasn’t the kind of return needed to launch the sci-fi action franchise EuropaCorp appeared to be aiming for.
The film arrived at a time when audiences were becoming increasingly selective about theatrical sci-fi, with mid-budget originals squeezed between giant superhero spectacles and established franchises. In another era, Lockout probably would have become a reliable sleeper hit on VHS or cable. In 2012, it mostly got buried.
Critically, the response landed in the familiar “fun but dumb” territory surrounding many Luc Besson-produced action movies of the era. The Fifth Element mastermind Luc Besson produced and served as co-writer in Lockout, but didn’t direct it, which might explain some of its problems.
