If you’re a filmmaker looking to get noticed with a high-concept, low-budget film, trapping a protagonist in a small space for an entire movie is a tried and true strategy.
Joel Schumacher found success by confining Colin Farrell to a pay phone in “Phone Booth,” Willem Dafoe charmed audiences while locked in a penthouse in “Inside,” and now fans of such films can look forward to watching Bill Skarsgård spend almost an entire feature film inside an SUV in “Locked.”
A remake of the Argentine thriller “4×4,” and often too cheesy for its own good, David Yarovesky’s two-hander stars Skarsgård as a small-time carjacker who picks the wrong self-driving vehicle to break into. He finds himself trapped and tortured over the phone by William (Anthony Hopkins), a dying man who is sick of petty crime. The film’s attempts at exploring morality might be underwhelming, but “Locked” finds plenty of silly opportunities to exploit its gimmick of a premise, likely to the delight of anyone who willingly buys a ticket to a movie about Bill Skarsgård being locked in a car.
Not since Jean Valjean stole bread to feed starving children have we been expected to sympathize with a thief as much as we are at the beginning of “Locked.” Eddie Barrish (Skarsgård) is a hustler who can’t catch a break to save his life. His beat-up van needs a new alternator, and a mechanic is trying to shake him down for double what he pays in rent every month to do the job. He can’t get his van back until he pays up, and he can’t do that until he puts in more hours as a delivery driver — which he can’t do without the van. The vicious cycle is made worse by the fact that his adorable daughter, Sarah (Ashley Cartwright), calls to see if he can pick her up from school. He has to hide his shame over his inability to come through on basic parenting tasks.
In an attempt to get things back on track, Eddie makes a bad decision. He breaks into a shiny black luxury SUV, hoping to find something he can sell for a few hundred bucks. But the doors quickly lock behind him, and an unknown number calls him on the car’s Bluetooth system. The voice of Anthony Hopkins begins to speak to him, and Eddie learns that a broken alternator is the least of his problems. William’s SUV has been broken into six times in the past year, and as he withered away from prostate cancer, he devised a scheme to make an example of the next thief who crossed his path.
The film proceeds to play out like a watered-down version of a “Saw” movie, with William playing a version of Jigsaw who’s less marginally sadistic but possibly even more self-righteous. All of those add-ons that he selected at the dealership prove useful to making Eddie uncomfortable, as he uses everything from intense heat to blistering cold air conditioning to get his starving, thirsty prisoner to confront the errors of his ways. (However, it’s hard to imagine a dealership being involved with the tasers that he built into the car.)
He goads Eddie into providing his social security number, allowing him to run a credit check and confront him over his overdue child support payments. And things really pick up once the car starts driving itself, with William threatening to steer his passenger off the edge of a building or into innocent children. William makes it clear that his torture methods won’t end until Eddie agrees to a violent method of penance for his sins, with options ranging from cutting off four fingers to shooting himself in the head with a conveniently placed pistol.
A film that takes place entirely inside of a car is inherently burdened by a limited visual vocabulary, but Yarovesky finds ways to get creative by relying on footage from William’s six in-car surveillance cameras in addition to the conventionally cinematic shots. Those moments of naturalism work better than many of the shots taking place outside of the car, which often use glaringly heavy-handed lighting to insinuate who we’re supposed to see as good and evil.
That question of what we see as “good” and “bad” represents the backbone of the narrative, as the two characters see the world quite differently. A deeply wealthy man, William has the luxury of ruminating on principles. He sees consequences for our actions as the only thing separating humans from animals and believes that his final purpose in life is to introduce accountability back into society. Hopkins has a blast with the role, spouting off soliloquies about right and wrong while gleefully pushing buttons that plunge Eddie into near-death scenarios from behind a curtain. Skarsgård’s Eddie, on the other hand, has no time for ideas, as every second of his day is simply spent trying to meet his family’s own material needs. His performance is a bit less theatrical, but it’s appropriate for a character who doesn’t have the time or energy to craft a Hollywood persona for himself.
These are not exactly new ideas, and “Locked” doesn’t do much more with them than what we’ve seen countless times before. But perhaps anyone who expected a movie about a man trapped inside an eccentric billionaire’s self-driving car to rewrite our conceptions of morality has only themselves to blame for asking too much. A film like “Locked” lives and dies by its ability to entertain us with images of a man banging on tinted windows for help while he faces the prospect of being hurled off the roof of a parking garage. And on that, it delivers.
Grade: C+
A The Avenue release, “Locked” is now playing in theaters.”
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