Image: Susie ALlnutt / HBO max
At some point in the past several months, pop culture created during the pandemic about the pandemic went from a cutting-edge novelty to just another fact of life: Of course it’s in all our movies and shows now, because it’s in everything now. Yet the strangeness of revisiting the very recent past hasn’t entirely dissipated, at least for this reviewer. Watching Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor muddle through March 2020 in Locked Down felt like watching someone — the characters, the actors, the filmmakers, or maybe myself — struggle to pin down something interesting or meaningful about the times, and never quite getting there.
With a premise that’s part rom-com, part heist thriller, and all COVID drama, Locked Down is a bit like if Mr. & Mrs. Smith, also from director Doug Liman, were set in a socially distanced London. And why not? If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past year, it’s that life still goes on while so many of us are stuck indoors. Plans are still made, schemes are still hatched, relationships are still formed or broken. But the formula’s not exactly right. Locked Down delivers too much on the drab reality of its premise and not enough on the escapist fantasy.
Locked Down delivers too much on the drab reality of its premise and not enough on the escapist fantasy.
For starters, and there’s really no other way to say it, the two leads are annoying as hell. Paxton (Ejiofor), a furloughed delivery driver, spends his days stewing in restlessness and resentment, occasionally punctuated by look-at-me antics like running into the middle of the street to shout poetry at his neighbors. Linda (Hathaway) is a brittle marketing exec who’s been pushed so far past her breaking point that she’s first introduced screaming into a pillow. After a decade together, they’ve decided to break up, only to find themselves forced to remain in the same tastefully appointed townhouse thanks to COVID restrictions.
So they alternate between bickering with each other, trying to ignore each other, and bickering about trying to ignore each other. Both are prone to lavish theatrical monologues (scripted by Steven Knight of Locke and Peaky Blinders) that might work in the context of, you know, an actual theater, but come off as overwritten played out over realistically glitchy Zooms and messy bedrooms. There’s no detail too small to unleash a flash flood of emotion — in this movie, not even a piece of tinsel gets to mind its own business without becoming the centerpiece of a speech about change or control or the limitations of therapy. Ejiofor and Hathaway pour themselves into each and every one, like the professionals they are, but watching them complain emphatically at each other is no fun, even if, or especially if, we recognize in them our own anxious selves from the start of the pandemic.
Raiding the food court of an empty department store does look fun, though.
Image: Susie Allnutt / HBO max
The wordiness better suits the final third of the movie, at which point it veers from a relationship dramedy (the “-medy” part is largely supplied by comic cameos from the likes of Mindy Kaling, Stephen Merchant, and Ben Stiller, though even their talents seem subdued here) to a heist flick. At least the empty halls of Harrods, the luxury department store where the crime is to take place, serve as a more grandiose stage for all of Paxton and Linda’s verbose outbursts of emotion, and it comes as a relief not to be stuck in such claustrophobic close quarters with them anymore. Unfortunately, Locked Down is no great shakes as a heist flick, either. It lacks the cleverness and the playfulness of an Ocean’s Eleven — or, for that matter, an Ocean’s 8, Hathaway’s other recent film about jewel thieves. Linda comes up with a plan, and then they carry out that plan, and it works or it doesn’t, and then we’re at the end of the story.
So what we’re left with, afterward, is an oddity of a film that’s trying to operate on multiple levels, and not quite clicking on any of them. It’s a comedy that’s not especially funny, and a drama that’s not especially deep, and a thriller that’s not especially exciting. Its central relationship is neither sweet nor sexy. Hathaway and Ejiofor have the exhausting chemistry of two people who deserve each other because they’re both insufferable in kind of the same way, which is not the same thing as having the sort of romantic spark that makes one root for them to be together, or the sort of fiery sizzle that makes them fun to watch sparring with each other.
As for that hooky pandemic backdrop, it gives Locked Down the sheen of relevance without adding much depth. Near the end of the movie, a character laments that “even before the fucking virus, we were all locked down in our routines,” putting in bald terms what seems to be the film’s larger theme — that the pandemic has forced us to reconsider who we are, and to reexamine the priorities and perspectives we’ve built our lives around. Yeah, and? We know that. We’ve lived it. What’s your point? I guess it’s a landmark in itself that we’ve reached the point in our pandemic art deluge that references to the pandemic might elicit not tears or winces, but shrugs.
Locked Down is now streaming on HBO Max.
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