Remember the 2013 movie LOCKE starring Tom Hardy? It’s not a thriller, it’s a drama, but the gimmick is that the whole thing is Hardy driving to a hospital and making phone calls trying to straighten out a huge mess he’s made for himself and others. In my review I joked about it being the start of a franchise, but I assumed they’d have titles like LOCKE: OVERDRIVE and be about Locke making other phone calls on other drives. I didn’t know they’d just add an extra letter to the title and have a different chameleonic actor playing a different character alone in a car talking on the phone for a different reason.

Okay yeah maybe technically and legally speaking LOCKED is not a sequel to LOCKE, it’s just the Sam-Raimi-produced American remake of the 2019 Argentine movie 4×4*. It stars Pennywise/The Crow/the boy who killed the world/younger brother of Tarzan/the Northman himself Mr. Bill Skarsgård, looking like Pete Davidson with his bleached hair, tattoos, pink pullover hoodie under a jacket and vape pen. I think he filmed this right after NOSFERATU, so I bet being locked in a car didn’t seem that bad compared to doing six hours of makeup in the morning and Mongolian throat singing between takes. It probly felt like a vacation. I wonder if transitioning out of his Orlok era is also the reason his accent is less consistent here than usual. Early on I wondered if he was not playing American this time, but he settles in after a bit.

Anyway he plays Eddie Barrish, a real fuckup. Eddie’s baby mama (Gabrielle Walsh, PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES) is on his ass about failing to pick up his daughter Sarah (Ashley Cartwright, A GODWINK CHRISTMAS: MIRACLE OF LOVE) but he’s helpless because he can’t get his van back from the garage because he doesn’t have the money he owes and he can’t get the money because he can’t make deliveries without the van. Not that he’s averse to dishonest work. When, in desperation, he steals a wallet and starts trying the door handles on parked cars it sure doesn’t seem like a first for him. But he’s nice enough to share his bottle of water with a dog locked in one of the cars – a “save the cat” moment that’s also foreshadowing.

He comes across a high end SUV from the fictional manufacturer Dolus and sure enough the doors are unlocked. But while searching inside for something he can pawn he discovers that the doors will not open from the inside, and then the dashboard phone starts ringing. When he eventually gives in and answers he is taunted by the vehicle’s owner, William (Anthony Hopkins, TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT), who says he got tired of it being broken into and turned it into a trap.

So it’s a thriller in which director David Yarovesky (BRIGHTBURN, NIGHTBOOKS) and adapter Michael Arlen Ross (TURISTAS, and editor of WRONG TURN) must come up with many imaginative ways for William to torment Eddie and for Eddie to try to survive within the limited confines of the SUV. William can control everything in the vehicle from the outside, so he messes with the air conditioning and heat, blasts a yodeling song on repeat literally for days, and when shit gets real serious starts remotely driving the car, threatening to run over people, including Eddie’s daughter. He also has electric shockers built into the car to punish Eddie for his various escape attempts (which he can see on multiple security cameras). They have long talks, with William getting all Jigsaw and lecturing Eddie about stealing or even things as stupid as cursing (and torturing him until it forces an apology.)

William also thought out many things like how to leave Eddie very occasional food and water, even what to do about a bullet wound, but he cruelly pushes him to desperation, trying to lick condensation off the sunroof, even contemplating drinking his bottle of piss. (It doesn’t really address what he does about shitting, though William later tells him it smells like shit in there and I thought that might’ve been the indication that he had in fact done it.

I think Skarsgård is one of the most exciting actors of his generation (even topping his brother) and though this is obviously not as showy as some of his best roles it’s another impressively layered performance, sort of a more down-to-earth version of his sweetheart dirtbag in THE CROW. It’s easy to turn your nose up to a guy who looks like that and has “IDGAF” tattooed on his neck and broke into a car and owes child support but also you sense a sincerity to his love for his daughter, his hope to turn things around, his admission of guilt and even his “I’m sorry to hear that” when William tells him he’s dying of cancer. I think there’s a strong DIE HARD influence here, and not just in the approach to action in a limited location, or even the way he gets dirtied, bloodied and exhausted across the course of the ordeal. It’s also in the character arc of Eddie, going from stubborn trash-talking defiance to emotional vulnerability. There’s a scene where he tries to record a voicemail for his daughter that I’m convinced is inspired by the scene where McClane worries he’s going to die and tells Powell what he wants him to pass on to Holly.

There are lots of flashes of graffiti and menacing street people and there’s a scene with guys in an alley up to no good that arguably support William’s view of the city as a crime-infested hellhole where he has to go all rich-guy-automated-Punisher on criminals because the cops won’t do anything. But he would also be scared by the shots of tent cities, which I think are important to illustrate the economic inequality of today. I don’t think they specify what city it’s set in, but if you’re me you know it’s probly filmed in Vancouver because Michael Eklund (HUNT TO KILL, TACTICAL FORCE, THE MARINE 3: HOMEFRONT, SEE NO EVIL 2) is in it as the owner of the garage Eddie argues with.

I have to admit I had a nagging feeling that it was a little undignified for Hopkins to do this kind of role only four years after winning best actor for his incredible work in THE FATHER. I don’t mean because of the genre – not at all – but because of how noticeable it is that it’s built around being able to do his part in maybe one afternoon on set and one in the recording studio. I guess so many DTV productions exploiting Bruce Willis or allowing others to be lazy have soiled the reputation of economical shooting schedules. I should just hope it wasn’t a matter of needing the money but instead something he thought would be fun without being too taxing at his age.

The other part of it is that since we mostly don’t see his face it lacks the power of even an average Hopkins performance. I would guess he recorded without many takes or Skarsgård reacting – I could be wrong – so at times it feels a little unnatural. But more importantly it makes me realize how much of his performance is missing when we don’t see his expressions.

Also, isn’t he a little old for this character? He’s always talking about his daughter who died, and he’s still a practicing obstetrician, I think? Oh well. Some of William’s taunting involves referring to “you kids” a bunch, but it gets a little more timely than that when he asks “Am I going to be cancelled?” and “Are you triggered?” It’s pretty goofy to hear 87 year old Sir Anthony Hopkins spewing the politically loaded catch phrases of particularly dumb American boomers, so for a second I didn’t buy it, but the more I think about it actually the more I like it. A rich octogenarian living his best HIGHEST 2 LOWEST life above the city, but having strong opinions about poor people and crime and deciding to spend what he believes will be the last months of his life (that turns out to be an overestimate) sadistically torturting a car thief (and others)… of course a guy like that is either consuming right wing media or – maybe more likely – taking very serious the right wing politics that have been laundered into local news and centrist Democratic talking points, including this fear of “cancel culture,” mockery of the term “triggered,” crime hysteria and antipathy toward the poor, the homeless, the addicted.

It bothers me how accepted it is in the U.S. (and not just by right wingers) that we can only dump our resources into punishing people and not into helping them. The average American seems to accept the idea that police budgets must grow bigger and bigger every year like an untreated tumor for us to be safe, but would feel like something was being taken from them if that money was used to straight up buy people housing or provide a universal income. They want tent cities out of their neighborhoods and junkies off of the sidewalks, but getting those people healthy and sheltered instead of just beating them up and chasing them from place to place? Eh, where would the money come? They see the crowds of people downtown doing the fentanyl bend and wonder how to get them out of there, not how to save their lives from this foul chemical. “Defunding the police” by taking away their preposterous militarization and overtime budgets and spending that money on building a better society with fewer destitute people for them to harass is considered crazy by pretty much all mainstream voices. That’s how fucking stupid we are. Too stupid to survive.

So I like that in a very matter-of-fact way, not an obvious moralizing one, this story demonstrates that actually people who make mistakes in their lives are still people, and sometimes a guy who breaks into cars is more moral and sane than a guy who gets really mad about it. Being a better father is up to Eddie, but making a society where more guys like Eddie get paid enough to support their kids is out of his hands. I would like to think both are possible.

LOCKED had a small theatrical release, I kinda meant to see it, but it actually seems pretty perfect for its current home on Hulu. It’s an intentionally small scale thriller with a simple premise powered by two very strong stars, at least one of them going hard in the paint or whatever. I recommend it for the next time you’re in the mood for a pretty good gimmick movie.

*4×4 already had two other regional remakes, both released in 2022: a Brazilian one called A JAULA and an Indian, Telugu language one called DONGALUNNARU JAAGRATHA. But pretty much the same premise had already been used in the 1998 American DTV movie CAPTURED. In that one it’s Andrew Divoff trapped in the car, and just like this one he’s tormented with loud music and lack of food and water. He even gets his fingers cut off in imitation of Sharia Law, as threatened in LOCKED. But it’s different in that it also follows the perpetrator (Nick Mancuso) and other people in his life who might discover what he’s up to. Still, I feel bad for CAPTURED writer/director Peter Liapis (also an actor in GHOST WARRIOR and GHOULIES I and IV) that he missed out on all that remake money even though he got there first.