Locked Down

Hol­ly­wood, tread care­ful­ly. One of the first nar­ra­tive fea­ture films to be shot dur­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic and include the dead­ly virus in its plot, Locked Down, penned by Steven Knight and direct­ed by Doug Liman, is an unfor­tu­nate dud and a stark warn­ing to the film indus­try to should strong­ly con­sid­er what sto­ries it wants to tell regard­ing the nov­el coronavirus.

Anne Hath­away and Chi­we­tel Ejio­for play an unhap­pi­ly mar­ried cou­ple who can bare­ly talk to each oth­er but are forced to because of the cir­cum­stances we all find our­selves in. There are fun­ny lit­tle wrin­kles that make their way into the sto­ry, like Ejiofor’s Pax­ton for­get­ting a face mask before going out (been there), telling peo­ple in the streets to ​“bug­ger off!” when they get too close, and the mass appre­ci­a­tion pour­ing in from the neigh­bour­hood to cel­e­brate key work­ers. But the film los­es its edge as soon as it starts to pry for sympathy.

Hathaway’s Lin­da bad­ly wants to escape the pres­sures of her cor­po­rate job. It’s a role the actor excels in thanks to her trade­mark fast-talk­ing anx­ious­ness. Pax­ton, mean­while, is tired of being looked down on as an ex-con and wants out of his reg­u­lar truck dri­ver gig, where his God-both­er­ing boss, played by Ben Kings­ley, barks ser­mons at him daily.

The cou­ple con­tin­u­al­ly bick­er and spar over their respec­tive work sit­u­a­tions, espe­cial­ly when Pax­ton finds out that Lin­da nev­er told her boss­es she was mar­ried. Ten­sions reach boil­ing point when Lin­da express­es a desire to return to her thrill-seek­ing ways, back when Pax­ton was a bik­er – anoth­er of the many plot devel­op­ments that plays ter­ri­bly because she’s throw­ing the bur­den of her social malaise on her Black hus­band. So, she sug­gests they attempt to pull off a dar­ing dia­mond heist as a sym­bol­ic means of sav­ing their relationship.

A sto­ry about sub­ur­ban ennui, rela­tion­ship repair and cab­in fever by way of quar­an­tine could have had comedic and dra­mat­ic poten­tial had it not been for the obvi­ous social bias­es at its core. Watch­ing an afflu­ent white busi­ness­woman deal with the ​‘hard­ships’ of fur­lough­ing her staff and climb­ing the cor­po­rate lad­der is a tone-deaf read­ing of what actu­al peo­ple are going through.

Why not exam­ine the lives of the peo­ple on the oth­er side of that call, the ones who lost their jobs and who might actu­al­ly ben­e­fit from a $3m dia­mond falling into their pos­ses­sion? Instead, those peo­ple are used as a cheap comedic ploy by way of Ben Stiller (play­ing Linda’s boss) con­grat­u­lat­ing Lin­da for her mass fir­ing via a Zoom call. There’s even a pathet­ic attempt to thank first respon­ders in the end cred­its, as if the film has any­thing to do with them.

If the oth­er quar­an­tine films due to come out are any­thing like this (cf Mal­colm & Marie) then Hol­ly­wood will be show­ing com­plete con­tempt for the peo­ple who watch these movies. Such films should be maligned just as much as that awful ​‘Imag­ine’ cov­er video which sur­faced on Insta­gram a few weeks into the first lock­down. The peo­ple who spend what mon­ey they do have on the array of sub­scrip­tion ser­vices on offer do not deserve to be insult­ed like this.