movie. Hopefully it’s not the best audiences can expect.
Anyone who has been locked down, pent up, frustrated and emotionally frayed will relate. Life with the virus has been hard and the light at the end of the tunnel is tiny. And so, British screenwriter Steven Knight (Oscar nominated
Dirty Pretty Things) pumps out this ode to imprisonment with little flair, not much depth, lots of dialogue, no grasp of one specific genre and unlovable characters. For good measure, in the middle of what is a tiresome couple’s personal drama, he tosses in a caper. Tonal issues and plausibility be damned.
Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor In Locked Down
1/14/2021
Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor play a couple heading for breakup when the opportunity for a diamond heist presents itself during pandemic lockdown in Doug Liman s crime comedy.
Perhaps there’ll come a time a few years from now, once the bludgeoning monotony of pandemic confinement has (hopefully) become a fading memory, when the claustrophobic agitation of Doug Liman s smugly self-satisfied heist thingamajig,
Locked Down, could be vaguely amusing. Or not. A lo-fi treatment of a high-concept crime rom-com deficient in sexual chemistry, laughs and suspense, this is a grating stunt in which actors who ought to know better, led by Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, play synthetically movie-ish characters meant to tickle us with the all-too-real trials of the COVID era. If you still think frozen screens and kids disrupting Zoom business calls are a hoot, it s all yours.