As Locked opens, Eddie (played by Bill Skarsgård) has already joined the tough-shit-out-of-luck club. He’s stone broke, his car is in the shop for major repairs that he has no money to pay for, and he’s being hounded by his ex-wife to pick up their young daughter after school. When the surly garage mechanic insults him, Eddie’s reply is to quickly scoop up the mechanic’s wallet and run down the sidewalk on foot.
He doesn’t get very far before he’s reduced to trying car door handles. Suddenly there appears a miracle—a black, shiny and amazingly unlocked luxury SUV, sitting by itself in a downtown parking lot, with the brand name insignia DOLUS on the back hatch. Eddie jumps in, but finds there’s nothing to steal. Worse yet, when he tries to open the door and escape, the doors and windows are securely locked. No matter how hard he clobbers them, they don’t budge. Eddie now finds himself confined in an impregnable, soundproofed, booby-trapped, four-wheeled prison cell.
Things go downhill even faster for poor Eddie. The smart vehicle is under the control of an unseen owner named William (Anthony Hopkins), who communicates with his victim electronically while torturing him with electric shocks and some hideous polka music—when that doesn’t work he tries Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky. William and Eddie match wits, so to speak, along lines of long-established societal resentment. The older man has a grudge against “coddled criminals” and “bleeding hearts,” and absent-mindedly mutters about cutting off the fingers of thieves. The would-be thief pleads poverty.
By this time in the movie—directed by David Yarovesky (Guardians of the Galaxy: Inferno, Brightburn) and produced by veteran horror honcho Sam Raimi—thriller audiences who know their way around might recognize Eddie’s predicament. It has hints of a similar scenario by filmmaker Stuart Gordon. Gordon’s Stuck tells of a newly homeless man, hit in the street by a stoned driver late one night, whose still-living body gets trapped halfway through the car’s windshield. There he stays, bleeding and groaning inside a garage, and no one wants to help him.
Stuck, a 2007 release co-written and directed by the late shockmeister Gordon (Edmond, King of the Ants and the brilliant Re-Animator), is a much better film than Locked.
Despite the efforts of cult favorite Raimi (The Evil Dead, Spider-Man) and a platoon of 27 (count ’em) other producers on Locked, Skarsgård and Hopkins—the latter shows up on screen sometime in the second half—run out of things to do with each other. Once we get past the rather tame mayhem bits—William runs down lower-class pedestrians, blames his SUV-bait snare scheme on previous crimes against his family, etc.—the dialogue can’t maintain the necessary intensity.
After his arguably noteworthy appearance as the title creature in the recent Nosferatu, actor Skarsgård struggles with slack-a-daisical pacing in Locked. Even Hopkins, armed with his Hannibal Lecter–style calmly malevolent line readings, never manages to raise the helter-skelter level much above a dull roar. William seems to bear a generational hatred for the young. When Eddie flinches away from the DOLUS rampage on a city street full of proles, William goads him: “Isn’t this what you wanted, Eddie? Chaos, revolution?” That’s about all there is in the motivational department.
Some quickie one-line thriller concepts work on first reading. Think of Snakes on a Plane, Cocaine Bear or Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. “Anthony Hopkins and Bill Skarsgård Trapped in a Burning Sport Utility Vehicle” somehow doesn’t rouse the imagination, prurient or otherwise. If we believe the credits, it took three writers—Mariano Cohn, Gastón Duprat and Michael Arlen Ross—to cook up something to take up the minutes after the DOLUS Death Mobile initially snaps its bulletproof doors shut on the pathetic figure of Eddie.
Locked has writing problems, and the combined efforts of Sam Raimi, Anthony Hopkins and Bill Skarsgård can’t do much about it. Maybe call a locksmith.
Now playing at the AMC Eastridge 15 and AMC Saratoga 14 in San Jose and the AMC Mercado 20 in Santa Clara.
