It’s been awfully tempting during this pandemic, for those in the entertainment industry to look to the current worldwide situation as a source of artistic inspiration -and it’s an understandable impulse. The world has changed drastically in such a short space of time and in such a specific way. For creatives, it’s only natural they would channel that, try and transform it into something: a statement, a comment, a message of solidarity with the millions struggling in isolation because of it. But it’s not just some nebulous thing that has forced us indoors, it is a plague that has claimed the lives of 95 million people. It’s a tragedy, and for creatives, especially those with real money behind them and major sources of distribution, depicting it is something you must be very careful with. We’re still in the midst of it after all.
Back in May, the show Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet put together an episode in quarantine, and while not the only scripted media to do such a thing, is probably still the only one that has done it right: respectfully, relatively truthfully and without glamour, and with genuine emotional understanding of how it’s affecting people. The complete opposite of something like that now infamous “Imagine” video (and all the other such celebrity virtual get-togethers), or that Songbird movie that nobody liked. But “too soon” doesn’t seem to mean anything for Hollywood when it comes to COVID-19 apparently, as demonstrated by yet another movie completely written and filmed during the pandemic with the supremely tone deaf title Locked Down.
Granted unlike Songbird, this film doesn’t come courtesy of Michael Bay but rather director Doug Liman and writer Steven Knight (though the film is sadly not a sequel to Knight’s similarly isolation-themed 2013 drama Locke). Knight had in fact written the film on a dare, which is cute, but surely not a good enough reason to follow a movie through to fruition. And predictably enough, Locked Down feels like a movie written as a bragging right more than anything else –story, character, and useful commentary all being secondary. And everything revolves around the pandemic, as much as the film consciously tries to sidestep it to be a relationship drama.
In what’s sure to become a cliché of fiction written about this time, Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor play a couple in London who were on the verge of a break-up when the lockdown orders came into effect, forcing them to continue living together longer than they’d planned. She’s an executive of a fashion company and he’s a delivery driver with a love of poetry, it’s an ideal rom-com scenario. And one of the sadder things about the film in light of its overwhelming mediocrity is that Hathaway and Ejiofor actually have really good chemistry. I might have preferred to see a slightly more traditional meet-cute plot with them, but they work just as well as a couple needing to reconnect. Even in their disgruntlement with each other, it’s somewhat charming. And don’t let it be forgotten that Knight is a good writer, their dialogue is pretty engaging. Under other circumstances, I would love to see them pull off a heist together.
That is the centrepiece of the film, though it comes into effect pretty late: the pair deciding to commit to a diamond heist at Harrods, splitting the profits off it between themselves and the National Health Service –a gesture that rings of a certain falseness and cynical lip-service under the circumstances of this fiction. It’s not a particularly satisfying operation though, as one might expect given the necessary remoteness until the actual job is done, and even then it’s quite banal and relatively easy. Say what you will about the opaqueness of Tenet, its’ heist sequences were at least exciting and interesting. Of course, Locked Down is fairly at a natural disadvantage, working within limitations it can’t help unless it just foregoes such a plotline entirely -which would have been the preferable choice.
This though is unrelated to the feeling of watching the movie, which is just kinda depressing, as it reinforces the miserable status quo right now through characters who spend much of the film likewise miserable. Occasionally one of its’ COVID jokes will be clever, but most of them are of the variety that have already been made stale countless times by the celebrity talk show sphere relating to digital conferences and video lag, and masks and hypochondria. And because COVID is such an enormous part of the movies’ identity, it just forces you to question things you otherwise wouldn’t. Unlike the aforementioned Mythic Quest episode, the film isn’t shot through individual Zoom screens or personal cameras and so you wonder if it was safe for Hathaway and Ejiofor to act physically with each other for so much of the movie. When you think about the professional film crew that must be on hand in some of the close sets or the fact that there are multiple scenes on location where the leads aren’t wearing masks or putting much effort into social distancing from other people, it starts to bother you. At the very least Hathaway had to break quarantine guidelines to fly to London. Clearly the best precautions weren’t always being taken with the filming of this movie, which seriously raises doubt about its’ sincerity. Sure, some traditional filming can be safely done now and when this was shot in the fall, but this is a movie about the pandemic that’s supposedly trying to set a good example.
I think Locked Down could have been something if Knight and Liman had just waited on it, and not stuck to filming it now just to prove they could. It would undoubtedly have been a stronger movie if COVID-19 was in the rear-view mirror, or even if it was to come out late this year, by which point the pandemic will supposedly be in its’ last stages. Locked Down certainly attracted a decent cast, including Mindy Kaling, Stephen Merchant, Lucy Boynton, Dule Hill, Ben Stiller, and Sir Ben Kingsley -most of whom video in their entire parts. There is a lot of goodwill on display and nothing as offensive as that title in the film itself. But it was an ill-conceived idea to put together right now, certainly in the state that Knight had written it in (honestly the one actor-one location set-up of Locke would have suited this movie far better). One day it’ll be acceptable to make movies about this time more liberally -but that day is still a long ways’ off.
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