LOCKED
Starring: Bill Skarsgård and Anthony Hopkins
Director: David Yarovesky
NICK
As far as under-the-radar releases go, I quite enjoyed Locked. Starring Bill Skarsgård and Anthony Hopkins, this remake of the Argentinian film 4x4 is a fun thrill-ride that's just the right amount of ridiculous. The co-leads are entertaining (it's nice to see Skarsgård without prosthetics) and there are no real lulls in the cat-and-mouse game. Unfortunately, any attempts at emotional moments don't really land, which dampens the stakes a little; however, the short runtime and deliberate pacing help mask that issue. As for entertainment value, though, I have no complaints here.
KATIE
Locked presents a basic concept that's pulled off well, driven by the entertaining performances of co-leads Bill Skarsgård and Anthony Hopkins. Although their characters are barely developed and I didn't care about their emotional backstories, I still had fun. The tense action is great, as is Hopkins’s delightfully sinister voice-over, but his morals are completely nonsensical, and a couple of his monologues verge on being tedious. I would have actually preferred if it disregarded character development and reasoning, focusing entirely on the cheap thrills and their compelling dynamic.
AMARÚ
Watching Locked, I couldn’t help but think about the epic Joel Schumacher thriller Phone Booth. Director David Yarovesky tries to set up a gritty opening similar to Schumacher’s introduction of Colin Farrell’s slimy Stu, but unlike the captivatingly tense relationship established between Stu and his captor (Kiefer Sutherland), I was unmoved by Bill Skarsgård’s sad sack Eddie, constantly annoyed by Anthony Hopkins running back his Transformers: The Last Knight brand of crazy, and bored by this slowly placed 90ish-minute movie. Wrap all this in multiple pompous lectures of society’s ills, and you get a pale imitation of the 2002 thrill-ride.
QUENTIN
In what feels like an unofficial and loose remake of Phone Booth, Locked serves up enough tension, social commentary, and “what would you do?” questions to make for an entertaining 90 minutes. Bill Skarsgård, who previously has created iconic villains under mountains of makeup (Nosferatu, Pennywise), is finally given a role where his unfiltered talent must do the heavy lifting, mostly succeeding in the process. As for Anthony Hopkins as the voice? He sounds disengaged, like director David Yarovesky had him record his lines while killing time at the airport (he’s no Kiefer Sutherland is all I’m saying). Still, Locked is better than it should be.
PAIGE
Despite Bill Skarsgård’s dedicated performance, David Yarovesky's Locked never made me strap in for the ride since it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. This is a straightforward and contained thriller that aims and fails to be pulse-pounding, offering neither tension nor thrills. To tell the truth, I found the plot to be increasingly monotonous and exhausting as the film went on. If a movie is going to beat its audience over the head with themes of class and structure, it either needs to have a clever script or entertain us. This movie doesn't do either one.
