Locked Exam: Hathaway and Ejiofor lead a fun pandemic heist movie

‘Locked Down,’ the latest and least accentuated entry in the emerging (and hopefully short-lived) subgenre of films shot during COVID-19, opens with a spectacle that will only make sense. little later: the biggest hedgehog possible stumbling in a London garden as if drinking cheap wine all day. A few minutes later, Doug Liman’s mostly amusing rallying cry for the rush of living meters that begins eerie with a spectacle that immediately makes sense to the world: Anne Hathaway screaming her way in a movie that was made in the middle of the worst pandemic in more than a century.

Some people just have to act, and Hathaway’s effective performance as an exhausted CEO who is forced to quarantine with her future husband (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is so big and busy she feels like she’s trying to do enough drama to support her. until all. the thing is blowing.

Indeed, Hathaway was so anxious to be in front of the camera again that she agreed to work with Steven Knight again to do so, even though it’s been less than two years since the big “Serenity” incident of 2019. To be honest with both of them, Knight’s final screenplay is much closer to his clever and content work on “Locke” than the Donald Kaufman-like shenanigans of his previous film, despite being hastily written and still looks like much to a first draft.

This shaggy can sometimes drain the energy of a crazy romance about two people rediscovering their thirst for life (and maybe each other too) while locked together in the same apartment in the end of the world, but light and good-natured “Locked Down” with a palpable sense of the purgatorial torpor that we all know so well. Most of these days aren’t shaped by a screenwriter’s intentionality and are full of exciting incidents, and even the best of Zoom calls can make us feel like we are screaming into the void. If so many of this movie’s COVID signifiers seem hacked here and now – video call echo, sourdough starters, a family member always telling you about an article they’re reading, etc. – they help to consolidate this ultra-candle comedy like the most Hollywood. realistic grip of life while locking. At least until her stars conspired to steal a $ 3 million diamond from Harrods one night.

Yes, “Locked Down” is a heist movie, although it’s more concerned with “stealing the things you feel life owes you” than priceless jewelry. And Paxton Riggs (Ejiofor) certainly believes that life has robbed him of a number of very precious things. Chief among them: the right to have a name as sick as Paxton Riggs. Once upon a time Paxton was a rebel without a cause – a badass type of biker who used to vroom around the world, dazzling beautiful women and beating the shit out of the men who stood in his way. Alas, it seems he hit one of them too hard; he won the fight, but lost hope of finding a decent job.

Ten years later, his marriage to the all-powerful Linda Thurman of Hathaway crashed and burned down largely because she rose to the top of a soulless company, and he was stuck working as a chauffeur. freight for a shipping service run by ultra-godly Ben Kingsley (imagine if his “Sexy Beast” character found Jesus). Recently put on leave and forced to sell his precious motorcycle just to fend for himself after the divorce, Paxton has now been stripped of the last remaining symbol of his manhood. Which makes him an insufferable roommate for his ex-wife, who is just as desperate to break free from what Paxton describes as “a fucking prison of psychological hellish chains.”

Linda may not share the erratic movements of Paxton’s head, but Hathaway finds plenty of other ways to express her character’s slow-motion collapse: drinking wine, screaming under the sheets, drinking more wine, monologizing. on Valkyries’ arbitrariness, dismiss his entire team. Zoom in, monologue on how the sinister forces of capitalism slid down his legs like the serpent of the Garden of Eden, swallowing a whole carafe of wine and dancing manically towards Adam and the ants in pajamas. There is a great implosive ‘Rachel Getting Married’ anxiety at work in her performance, and although this material does not allow for the same degree of reach or depth, Hathaway still knows how to vibrate the bars of a cage. golden without completely losing its charm.

Paxton and Linda are so full of pent-up energy that it can be maddening to watch them try to spend it on each other ad nauseum – to the point that it feels like Liman has punctured the movie than with so many Zoom calls in sequence. to provide him with air holes for him to breathe (and opportunities for socially distant cameos from Kingsley, Ben Stiller and Mindy Kaling). It’s a small pity, then, that “Locked Up” isn’t limited to video applications; As sad as it may be to admit, there is a little thrill watching actual movie stars like Ejiofor and Hathaway perform new material in glorious high definition, even if they do so mostly in their pajamas.

There’s an extra rush to the wandering scenes in which these characters roam outside, even if that’s just so Paxton can feast the whole neighborhood with a dramatic read from DH Lawrence’s poem “Stand Up!” (“Stand up for a new arrangement / for a chance to live all around / for the freedom and fun of living / enter and hold the land!”). And while the film’s long transition to a low-key caper hinges on so many ridiculous coincidences that Linda can only attribute them to God, it’s oddly exciting to watch Ejiofor and Hathaway – both wearing masks – come out of the house for sneak up. Harrods iconic food court and the cavernous tunnels below.

Seeing famous people move freely around the COVID world without killing anyone feels like a heist in itself, and the henpecked feuds between Paxton and Linda take a backseat in the sheer joy of seeing them safely reclaim a measure of liberty on their lives for a good cause (the theft is partly for the NHS). The same goes for the actors who play these characters, and for the team that made the production around them possible. The best moments of “Locked Down” capture the same jolt of “I can’t believe they really did this” the excitement surrounding the news that Liman is going to space to find with Tom Cruise. If you can survive the cabin fever and a painful Edgar Allen Poe runner who never finds a decent punchline, there’s a solid reward waiting on the other side.

More importantly, “Locked Down” doesn’t totally give in to its context. The film could lose much of its charge if and when we get this virus under control, but Knight’s script uses the pandemic more as a setting than a subject. COVID-19 serves as the backdrop for a friendly brawl over the freedoms we take for granted and the limits that dictated our lives long before we had to spend them at home. “A complete reexamination of her life appears to be a side effect of COVID,” sighs Linda at one point, but here – in the kind of movie that would never be made with stars of this caliber without a global crisis – this deadly symptom may seem dangerously close to a ray of hope.

Category B

“Locked Down” will be available to stream on HBOMax starting Thursday, January 14.

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