Lockout

Lockout is an uninspired action movie with a sci-i framing device (that is not very strongly developed).

Guy Pearce stars as the anti-hero, Snow, a sassy spy recently caught for supposedly killing another spy for his secrets. Concurrently, the President's daughter Emilie (Maggie Grace) is working on her pet project--investigating the maltreatment of hardened criminals in the space station maximum security prison, where inmates are kept in suspended animation (although I don't know what kind of punishment that is supposed to be other than separating these criminals from whatever loving families they may have). This stasis is suspected to be damaging to the inmates once they are reanimated; Emilie also suspects the government of using the inmates as guinea pigs for scientific experiments. She travels to this prison but unfortunately due to some dumb things some supposedly smart people do, she and others are kept as hostages once the entire prison's population is reanimated, due to some plotting by one of the criminals.

Desperate, Secret Service agents (Peter Stormare, Lennie James) coerce Snow to be a one man rescue team to retrieve the President's daughter. At first the prisoners do not know who they have captive, but once they do, the stakes go higher. The revolt is led by Alex (Vincent Regan) and his sadistic brother (Joseph Gilgun).

Snow and Emilie at first have little in common, and they trade quips and one liners. Snow just wants to finish this mission, which he took as a way to secretly retrieve some info from his cohort in crime currently imprisoned here; Emilie wants to protect her entourage and still has some idealistic views of the prisoners. But none of the prisoners have any similar ideals and it is mayhem.

While Pearce has some fun with his role, the characterizations of all the characters were pretty two dimensional, stereotypes or caricatures. In order for us the audience to have some sympathy for the prisoners, Alex, as the leader, needed to be more faceted rather than a hardened criminal looking out for his waste of a brother. And who made him leader anyway? The other prisoners are not personified at all, and just background hulks to act as killers or be killed themselves. This does not bode well for Emilie's views of treating these men better or having us sympathize more with Alex, who is the best realized of the prisoners (but that is still not saying much). 

No real sci-fi concepts are explored here; they are, like the prisoners, background fodder to the foreground action story. Even before the film's end you know Emilie and Snow would kiss and make up and form a dynamic duo, and even become friends.