Locke (***1/2)

For awhile, screenwriters didn’t know what to do with cell phones. They’d have characters  bizarrely toss them away (e.g., Wild Hogs) or wander improbably into places with no signal, just so the characters wouldn’t be able to escape elaborately concocted predicaments with a call. But, a decade on, whole plots are being predicated on the existence of mobile technology. How different, and dull, would a film like Buried have been if its main character had been buried alive without a phone?

Locke is like Buried in that it features just one actor (Tom Hardy) on screen for the entire length of the film, plus a number of characters who are only heard. Locke is in a car, and is only buried in responsibilities. Driving toward London, he will be missing the football match he’s promised to watch with his son. Also, he will be missing the first day of his company’s most ambitious project, a skyscraper on which he is the construction supervisor. Also, the woman, not his wife, whom he slept with on a business trip is about to give birth to his baby. He intends to be with her. These are the key plot points, all provided in the first 15 minutes.

Imagine you are having an argument with the sort of person whom, no matter how much you yell at him, he continues to speak in a calm voice to the point where it becomes irritating. Imagine it with a Welsh accent and you may well picture the character of Ivan Locke, who imagines that all mistakes can be put to right, and that it is important to do the right thing, even if in doing so he must let down his family and coworkers.

This is the setup for a high-concept thriller, and yet most of suspense is about how Locke will behave, not what, in the larger sense, will happen. The writer-director, Steve Knight, was the screenwriter on some excellent, character-driven thrillers — Dirty Pretty Things, Eastern Promises, Closed Circuit —and, with Redemption, his directorial debut, gave Jason Statham perhaps his most fleshed-out role to date. Locke may take place on a fast highway, but its title character always drives the speed limit.

IMDb link

viewed 5/22/14 7:25 pm at Ritz Bourse and posted 5/22/14