Locked

by Mike McGranaghan

Locked is like Saw if Jigsaw only had one trap. This is a gimmick-driven movie through and through. Although the gimmick is clever, sustaining it for an hour and a half proves difficult. Suspension of disbelief is required; how much you enjoy the film depends on how long you can suspend that disbelief.

Eddie Barish (Bill Skarsgård) is a petty criminal who, in the first scene, forgets to pick up his young daughter from school because he’s too busy getting into trouble. Yeah, that old trope again. He stumbles upon a very expensive looking SUV in an isolated parking lot. Figuring there’s got to be something in there worth stealing – and since the vehicle is conveniently unlocked – Eddie hops in.

That’s when he discovers this is no ordinary SUV. The wealthy owner, William (Anthony Hopkins), has booby-trapped it and watches his hostage from a distance via the many internal cameras. Eddie is locked inside for days, administered a shock from the seats every time he fails to obey one of the commands William makes over the Bluetooth dashboard.

There aren’t a ton of new ideas in Locked. William first freezes Eddie with the air conditioning, then turns the car into a sweatbox by jacking up the heat. Those tortures were used in Inside, the thriller where Willem Dafoe gets locked inside an apartment. William has no food or drink, and he has to pee in a bottle. (Where does he do the other thing? The picture doesn’t bother going there.) Those scenes generate some general viewer discomfort. Better are the ones where William remotely drives the car in a reckless manner, causing his passenger to be violently jostled around.

The problem with any kind of gimmick movie is that eventually it risks painting itself into a corner. While the first hour is reasonably diverting, the last thirty minutes go off the rails with ridiculous developments that are too silly to buy into. One also can’t help noticing that Skarsgård and Hopkins do not appear to have filmed their climactic scenes together. Instead, they’re seemingly joined by clever editing, which undercuts the tension.

The two leads are the best part of the movie. Skarsgård effectively captures the panic and desperation Eddie feels as his situation worsens. Hopkins, meanwhile, is only heard for the first two-thirds yet portrays William with a cheery type of menace. Imagine Hannibal Lecter on uppers. Both actors elevate the rickety material, finding something genuine amid the gimmickry.

Director David Yarovesky (Brightburn) gives the film visual slickness and a fast pace that make it relatively painless to sit through. That carries Locked a little way, but the screenplay’s insistence on trying to add depth via a theme of economic disparity falls flat. It says nothing we don’t already know. The movie undeniably has some decent moments. Their impact, however, is minimized by too many absurdities and too much sermonizing.

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