The star-powered COVID drama Locked Down is nearly as annoying as, well, lockdown
Film Reviews Movie Review
Locked Down, the new surprise HBO Max movie directed by Doug Liman and written by Steven Knight, is not the first major motion picture to be conceived, filmed, and then released during the pandemic. (That distinction belongs to last month’s Songbird, a.k.a. the fear-mongering dystopian COVID thriller produced by Michael Bay.) But it might be the first to present itself as a relatable vision of how we’re all living—a quarantine movie about life in quarantine. To which any sane viewer might reply, “No thanks!” It was inevitable that films would be made about this significant chapter in global history, in part because a small group of people enduring an extended stay in their own homes is about the only scenario it’s safe and logistically possible to actually shoot right now. But did the results have to start arriving while we’re all still stuck in this nightmare?
Shot in September, with a small cast in a small number of locations, Locked Down is set a little earlier—namely, late last spring, when it began to dawn on everyone that this wasn’t going to be over in a mere matter of weeks. (“They canceled the NBA,” complains a friend in America, effectively situating the film near the onset of our new normal.) The first thing we see is someone logging, begrudgingly, into a video chat. If nothing else, Locked Down captures all the hiccups of virtual communication: the buffering, the lag, the out-of-sync audio, the echo effect when two screens in the same household get too close together. You might nod with recognition—or wonder why you’re subjecting yourself to more boxes within boxes, a simulation of the simulated hangouts that have become our best option for socializing in the era of social distancing.
Thankfully, the whole film isn’t on that tablet. Long stretches of it do, however, take place in one place: the spacious London home of longtime partners Linda (Anne Hathaway) and Paxton (Chiwetel Ejiofor). She’s a rising executive at an ill-defined, vaguely fashion-related international corporation, wore out by her role as the bearer of bad news to employees being unceremoniously cut loose. He’s a former drug dealer and ex-convict who’s been furloughed from his clean, steady gig as a delivery-truck driver. The two are in the early stages of separating, and each are coping with their isolation in different ways—Linda by day-drinking and chain-smoking, Paxton by sampling the opiates growing in his garden and regaling the whole block with late-night poetry readings (a quirky insomnia cure that the film seems to believe the neighbors would mostly find charming, rather than really fucking annoying).
For Liman, this is a return to some approximation of indie filmmaking after a couple decades helming action vehicles for Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Matt Damon. He shot the movie in just 18 days, the same amount of time it took him to make Swingers a lifetime ago. Perhaps there’s some self-portrait in Linda and Paxton’s wistful nostalgia for their salad days as careless, carefree young lovers, zipping around the city on his motorcycle. But Locked Down is more plainly Knight’s. The British screenwriter, whose similarly titled Locke was itself an experiment in close-quarters dramatic intimacy, uses the restrictions of COVID life as an excuse to indulge his appetite for blatantly theatrical tête-à-têtes. At a whopping 180 pages, his script unfolds as a string of breathless monologues and labored quips. Everything is a symbol to this writer: a bike, a bandana, a bag of flour, a Christmas decoration left up too long. One might charitably call that a symptom of quarantine; stuck looking at the same shit all day every day, it’s hard not to invest it with deeper meaning.
By the time a viewer realizes that Knight is riffing on the classic comedy of remarriage, Locked Down is pivoting to a shaggy heist-film scenario. The movie’s backstretch unfolds primarily in a half-empty Harrods, the luxury London department store, repurposed here as a massive film set thanks to the significant reduction of foot traffic caused by the pandemic. One might accuse the filmmakers of cheating on their setup, but maybe that just allows the movie to function as wish fulfillment: Who right now wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to leave the house and embark on an unexpected caper? Though it fills its little video-chat windows with famous faces (at times, we could be watching one of those celebrity table reads, with surprise guests popping in for a quick Zoom cameo every few minutes), Locked Down mainly rests on its stars, grappling earnestly with the mouthfuls Knight feeds them. While Ejiofor keeps his cool, this is the Hathaway show, for better or probably worse: Having survived the noir-kitsch vamping Knight saddled her with in Serenity, she boldly overacts her way through a motor-mouthed pantomime of screwball stress, bounding from tipsy soliloquies to embarrassing Adam Ant rage dances.
Maybe this all works, accidentally or not, as a time capsule of very contemporary irritation. Will future audiences look back on Locked Down and feel some of our pain, watching two good actors sputter through a simulacrum of cabin-fever conflict? What they won’t get, for all the Zoom gags and insights into the itchy impatience of an interrupted social life, is a sense of how most of us really lived in 2020. Because though the aim may be to immortalize this shitty present, Knight and Liman look at it through the lens of those for whom a lack of space is a decidedly relative problem and the economic symptoms of COVID an abstract one. After all, this is a movie whose plot hinges, amusingly but snobbishly, on the average person having no idea who Edgar Allen Poe is, and on the truly outrageous notion of a laid-off corporate casualty covering, happily and righteously, for the very middle manager who fired him. Of course, maybe a little out-of-touch cluelessness isn’t such a bad thing in this case. Cinema need not be an escape, but good luck finding anyone stoked to see their own daily, indoor tedium accurately reenacted by movie stars on webcams.
31 Comments
Man, this really reads like “I didn’t like this movie because I didn’t want to be reminded of the pandemic.” Okay, but what if I’m totally fine with being reminded about the pandemic? I’ve been working from home for the last four years and I’m a homebody anyway, so for me, not much has changed. With that in mind, would I enjoy it?
idk man who cares. even if the review said ‘hey dirtside, you’ll like this movie’ wouldn’t you still be a little suspicious?
I’d be a little worried that Dowd was stalking me, yeah. But for a general-purpose movie review, “I’m giving this movie a bad review because I don’t like the subject matter” doesn’t seem particularly useful.
i think in a general sense maybe, but in this specific case it’s extremely warranted.
I don’t know, man. I think most of us are hoping that Hollywood will just pretend this never happened after everything is back to semi-normal. I don’t want to see the Avengers wearing masks and social distancing. Just let this become a bad dream.
Ignoring for a moment my strong personal opinion that no creative type should ever write a movie, book, or TV show about the pandemic, this really does just seem like one of those “unlikable rich people stare wistfully at each other while dealing with pretty normal relationship issues” movies.I guess it’s progress that it’s an interracial couple now staring wistfully at each other, but other than that it seems pretty forgettable.
Isn’t there a heist? That seems to make it a little different from a typical “unlikable rich people with relationship problems” movie.
you don’t think ANY creative type should EVER write about it? i have to respect the totality of this take.personally i think it will be very interesting to see what people who are young now’s take on all this is in 20 or so years.
I will grudgingly narrow my focus to just movies/books/TV being made now while we’re still in it. Not only are we all living through it right now, but they just come off as vanity projects. Just because somebody was able to film an entire psychological thriller in their breakfast nook doesn’t mean it’s worth watching.
Some ongoing series set in the present may have to answer the question “what did the characters do during the pandemic?”, but I’m not convinced there’ll be much appetite for new fiction about it while we’re all so close to it.
yeah i agree the rush is weird and manic and a bit gauche. it’s like when they were making ww2 movies starring ww2 vets while ww2 was still on. were people into those at the time? i have to imagine many were like ‘this is weird.
This is kind of an interesting take, since as a culture/nation/species we lived through something very similar 100 years ago, and we have essentially no artistic or historic record of it. If you consider the amount of inane or fantastical stuff that is exhaustively documented in film and writing in the 21st century, the idea that we should leave out the most significant historical event of any of our lives is interesting. It’s a logic that doesn’t extend to, say, movies about World War 2 that were made during World War 2. Not to single you out, but this idea that we shouldn’t make art about the pandemic was very much a part of the 1918 pandemic. It’s just fascinating to see the same idea in circulation now.
It’s a fun enough movie if being reminded of the pandemic doesn’t bother you, and if you like the lead actors enough (because there’s a LOT of them). Some of it is a bit overwrought, but it’s no worse than other movies that focus exclusively on a limited number of characters in one or two locations. I actually think the movie uses the pandemic setting fairly sensitively; it doesn’t feel exploitative, if that’s the right word for it.
This review leaves out the most important thing we garbage eaters in the greys want to know. Does Anne Hathaway get naked in it?
“While Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman have undeniable chemistry, it’s hard to enjoy a movie that uses the ongoing conflict in Europe as the backdrop for a love story. C-”
I’ve liked every Liman movie I’ve seen so far, including the comedy of remarriage, so perhaps this will work for me but still not be enough to repair the damage done to his career by Chaos Walking.
How has his career been damaged by a movie that’s not out yet? The wiki article for Chaos Walking mentions poor test screenings and re-shoots, were the test screenings really THAT bad?Also, I loved Go, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and Edge of Tomorrow, so I hope we get some more solid flicks out of Liman.
Chaos Walking went overtime and overbudget, and I believe Fede Alvarez did the reshoots. Liman already had a reputation for being a difficult director (hence being replaced after the first Bourne movie), but this one did seem to go significantly longer than usual.
Ahh, that makes sense. I saw Alvarez did the reshoots but figured that was just a scheduling issue.
She’s a rising executive at an ill-defined, vaguely fashion-related international corporation, wore out by her role as the bearer of bad news to employees being unceremoniously cut loose. He’s a former drug dealer and ex-convict who’s been furloughed from his clean, steady gig as a delivery-truck driver.*Raises eyebrow*
Honestly, just sounds like your typical SF/Oakland couple.
They’re the original Odd Couple!
The two are in the early stages of separating, and each are coping with their isolation in different ways—Linda by day-drinking and chain-smoking, Paxton by sampling the opiates growing in his garden and regaling the whole block with late-night poetry readings.Either AA Dowd doesn’t know what opiates are, or this movie features someone growing and cultivating poppies in a backyard in London.
This review is positively benign compared with this…https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/jan/13/locked-down-review-anne-hathaway-and-chiwetel-ejiofor-pandemic-stinker
I liked the second half of the trailer, when it suddenly served into becoming a pandemic heist after initially seeming to be a slightly insufferable upper-middle-class indie drama.Sadly, it sounds like it’s mainly a slightly insufferable upper-middle-class indie drama.
That’s ANNIE Hathaway to you, buddy!Anyway, this sounds dreadful.
Posted to the wrong place; please ignore.
Honestly I’ll probably give this a watch. I like Doug Liman, I love the leads, and Roku & HBO Max finally ended their pissing contest, so yeah I’ll check this out.
This sounds like it could have potentially worked if directed by the Dardenne Bros and a totally separate cast.
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I actually enjoyed the movie right until they got to the actual heist. IT MADE NO F’ING SENSE AT ALL.*some spoilers to follow*There are cameras every where and lip readers watching your every move, but you can just take thousands of dollars from the food hall?? Sneak up onto the roof to make out with your delivery driver? Stand awkwardly in front of a diamond for minutes on end to debate your next move?? A rando shows up saying they called the cops but the head security guard just wanted to return a name badge?? WHAT.And don’t get me started on the extremely weirdly inconsistent use of masks and. One minute it’s all masks, the next it’s no masks…sometimes in the same scene.