Lockout (2012)

Lockout arrives in 2012 with a Luc Besson script, a Guy Pearce smirk, and a French court judgment waiting for it three years down the road. John Carpenter would eventually win damages for the resemblance to Escape from New York, and the resemblance is not subtle. A wrongly convicted agent is offered his freedom in exchange for retrieving the President's daughter from an orbital penitentiary that has fallen to its inmates. The machinery is efficient. The characters are not complicated. Snow wisecracks through a hostage crisis the way a man orders coffee.

The film's politics are narrower than its premise suggests. The prison system here is run by the state for the state, and the inmates are used as test subjects without consent, which gives the story a decent, if familiar, suspicion of institutional power. That suspicion stops at the walls of the facility. The cast is overwhelmingly white, and the narrative has no interest in race, sexuality, or the body as a site of meaning. Maggie Grace's Emilie is competent and survives on her own initiative, though her function is to be rescued and to soften the hero. The one portrayal of mental deterioration is played for plot utility. A confused man rambles a code, and the film moves on.

It carries itself without sermons, which is its saving grace and also its limitation. There is a glance at the ethics of stasis confinement and nothing more. No speeches. No lessons. Besson's fingerprints show in the efficiency, not the ideology. The result is a serviceable B-movie with a decent anticapitalist sneer, a mostly indifferent social imagination, and a leading man who deserved better material. The classification is straightforward. The rewatchability is a separate question, and the answer is no.