Locked Down is a movie that wants to be a lot of things. Written and filmed entirely in the pandemic and released on HBO Max earlier this year, it wants to be a cute romcom, an emotional and relatable look into life during the pandemic, and a stylish heist film. Unfortunately, it doesn’t hit the mark on any of them.
The first thing you notice about the movie is its desperation to be an honest portrayal of life in quarantine. With constant references to Zoom, government health guidelines, and life in lockdown (but suspiciously not a single reference to what might be causing it), this film needs you to know its characters are just like you. However, a lot of these attempts at relatability come across as hollow and even stressful at times. There’s no reason a character on a Zoom call needs to have their audio echo through the other person’s speakers, except to get the audience to say, “Hey, sometimes my audio echoes on Zoom through the other person’s speakers!” I don’t need to hear Ben Stiller talk about how great his AirPod Pros are, and I don’t need their Phenomenal Noise-Cancelling Feature used to set up a joke about kids interrupting a work Zoom call. (On a related note, I firmly believe movies as a whole should be banned from using the default iPhone alarm sound).
The film is set very early in the pandemic, with characters seeming largely unaware of basic mask etiquette. They barely wear masks for a good chunk of the film only to then take them off randomly when entering public locations such as a bus or store. I know it seems like a small thing to focus on, but, given the amount of attention the movie gives to pandemic culture, it’s worth pointing out how short it falls.
The real meat of the film, however, is the romantic comedy. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Anne Hathaway star as Paxton and Linda, a couple on the verge of collapse forced to stay together in lockdown. She’s a hardworking, no-nonsense business woman, and he’s a motorcycle-riding, poetry-reading, bad-boy-turned-sensitive-artist delivery driver. They both feel out of control of their lives, and want to do something that feels real again. Ejiofor and Hathaway do a fine job, but there’s not that much under the surface of either character, or anyone in the movie for that matter. At its core, there is a worthwhile idea here of two people that have grown apart, locked in a single location and forced to confront their future. This idea has been explored at great length by countless playwrights, who famously just love to spend three hours with two people shouting at each other in a single location. The movie does feel very theatrical in this way, with long confessional monologues and a great deal of time spent with characters just staring at each other, or out a window. It’s also worth noting that outside of the basic setup and the hashtag-so-true humor, the pandemic really has no effect on the story or characters, and this story might actually be improved by taking it out. There are plenty of other reasons to shove characters in a single location for the length of a movie, something that screenwriter Steven Knight has actually explored in a previous (and far better) film, Locke.
At this point, you may have forgotten that this movie is also supposed to be a heist, just as I did watching the movie. While you get hints that Paxton’s boss (Ben Kingsley, whose performance is just plain weird) might be into some shady business early on, it isn’t until just past the halfway point that Linda brings up the three million dollar diamond stored at Harrods, the department store where she used to work. Linda is tasked with supervising the valuable stone due to her vague, high-level job at a nondescript fashion company. Conveniently enough, Harrod’s is also where Paxton’s next delivery job happens to be taking him. Linda claims that stealing the diamond would be her way of getting back at the buyer of the diamond, who was an asshole to her at a business convention a year prior, but the thematic undercurrent of the film makes it feel much more like this is one last attempt for the two of them to feel like they’re in control of their lives. It’s also not as if they need the money—Paxton may just be a delivery driver for a sketchy company, but Linda does have her gig at Large Fashion Company Inc. and indeed gets a promotion about a third of the way into the film.
The heist itself is about twenty minutes long at the end of the film, and there’s not much to say about it. I am a noted fan of capers, cons, heists, and the like, and the film is directed by Doug Liman, who created the Bourne franchise and directed classic romcom/spy action movie Mr. & Mrs. Smith so maybe I went in with hopes too high. The heist feels far too truncated and anticlimactic to be what the entire film was supposedly building towards. There’s only one or two hiccups in their plan, and both of them are solved almost immediately and leave no space for improvisation, which is typically the most fun and engaging part of these types of movies.
I’d also forgive the boring heist if it worked to resolve or progress the relationship conflict, but the resolution kind of makes it seem like they could’ve just gotten into watching Tiger King or doing jigsaw puzzles and their relationship would’ve worked out in the same way. Those last twenty minutes do get the only truly funny moment of the film, with Mark Gatiss as a former employee of Fashion Company Incorporated who, like Paxton and Linda, just wants to feel he’s in control of something. While a great moment in the narrative, it did make a poignant (if unintentional) statement about how useless and meaningless this film is. During this pandemic in which over two million people died, Locked Down seems to think that the biggest problem facing the world is upper middle class couples with no children who are bored in their two-story London homes. It says a lot that this movie chooses to follow an executive who is tragically forced to fire people during a pandemic, and not someone who is fired in a pandemic and has to then use their skills and knowledge from that job to pull off a heist. Maybe that might give the movie a sense of stakes, urgency, or much of any reason to care at all.
Which brings us to the point: you really don’t need to watch this movie. Everything it’s got has been done better somewhere else, and this unique combination doesn’t do enough with anything it’s given to justify itself. If you want to watch an intense single-setting relationship drama, go see Locke, or Malcolm and Marie, or any Tony-winning play from the last eighty years. If you want Covid-era content that doesn’t make you incredibly stressed out, check out How To with John Wilson or even Borat: Subsequent Movie Film. If you want a heist with a great heart, I can’t recommend The Brothers Bloom enough, or honestly even Ocean’s Eleven.
Just… you don’t need to watch this movie. It’s not even fun to make fun of. Trust me, you don’t need this extra combination of stress and boredom in your life. I’m sure you have enough as it is.