Anthony Hopkins menaces Bill Skarsgård in this vehicular nailbiter, but there’s not much under the hood.
Remember Locke? Steven Knight (House Of Guinness) put Tom Hardy in a car for 85 minutes, playing a guy in absolute crisis trying to manage various personal and professional catastrophes by phone as he barrels down the motorway. The conceit is that we never leave his car, and we never see anyone else – we’re just locked (b’dum tish!) in there with him, Hardy’s performance carrying the whole thing.
Locked isn’t a remake of Locke but, man, is it close. It’s actually an English language redo of the 2019 Argentine thriller, 4×4. Plus, Bill Skarsgård‘s petty criminal, Eddie Barrish, really only has one problem. Having tried to rob exactly the wrong unattended SUV, he’s now locked inside the high tech behemoth, being tormented by Anthony Hopkins – or at least Anthony Hopkins‘ voice – as William, a vengeful millionaire who has kitted the rig out as a kind of remote control execution chamber. The car is both the bait and the trap, and it’s snapped shut around poor Eddie.
As a concept, that’s not too bad, but perhaps a little thin for a feature length film. It feels more like an anthology series episode – something from The Twilight Zone or maybe, at a pinch, Black Mirror. It’s a neat idea, and Skarsgård makes for a surprisingly winning dirtbag. His Eddie is an aimless petty criminal and a deadbeat dad, reluctantly motivated by the thought of letting down his daughter before more pressing concerns of survival come to the fore. As for Hopkins? Well, all jokes about phoning it in aside, it’s hard not to enjoy his melodious Welsh tones as he needles our poor protagonist while using the car’s various gizmos to torture him.
Director David Yarovesky (the James Gunn-produced Brightburn) keeps things moving briskly and makes the most of the films deliberately constrained staging However, Michael Arlen Ross’s script stumbles when it attempts any depth or, god help us social commentary – a scene where Hopkins and Skarsgård argue over class division and inequality lands with a thud. Locked is a much smoother ride when it concerns itself with narrative mechanics rather than thematics. Thankfully, that’s exactly what it does for most of its tight 96 minutes, giving us a taut little thriller that will entertain in the moment, but probably won’t linger in the memory.
Locked is streaming on Prime Video now.
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