Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Lockout (aka Seriously?!?)

You know the old adage "Put a million monkeys at a million typewriters for a million years, and one of them will eventually pound out Hamlet?" Well suppose you only have one monkey and 3 months. You might end up with Battlefield Earth. And if you only have a week, you going to get a new Rob Schneider movie. But before it even starts typing, that monkey is likely to rip the paper out of the typewriter, wipe his ass with it, and throw it on the ground. I present to you Lockout.

Lockout is a sci-fi action thriller co-written by Luc Besson. Unfortunately that's where the upside ends. I refuse to see this movie on the grounds that, judging by the trailer, it is simply an exercise in stitching together every woefully overused cliche in the history of Hollywood. Riot in a maximum security space station prison while the President's daughter is there on a goodwill mission, and her only hope for survival is a burned out former CIA agent who was framed for a crime he didn't commit.

There's a line of dialogue in the trailer when they are discussing who they can recruit for the suicide rescue mission, and when the protagonist is mentioned someone actually says "He's the best there is, but he's a loose cannon." They actually say that. That's real dialogue from this sad excuse for a movie. Someone (hopefully not Luc Besson) sat at a table, typed out those lines while writing shitting out this script, and thought "Yeah, I like the sound of that." And then other people read it, and didn't object. And THEN some "actors" read the lines out loud while cameras were rolling and nobody stopped them. Holy shit I can't believe that series of events actually happened in the real world. I can only guess that there was some sort of radon gas leak in the studio when all this was happening and nobody was really alert enough to yell "Cut! Guys... what the fuck are we doing?"

"Whoa... you're right. That line is really bad."

"No, not that. Well, I mean yeah, that's fucking horrible and we should all have our WGA cards revoked, but I'm talking about this whole thing. Has anybody read this through?"

"...not really. I just sort of flipped through it absentmindedly while I was huffing glue."

"Yeah, I used the first few pages to make cole slaw for dinner last night.":

"You made cole slaw out of paper??"

"Yeah."

"And you ate it?"

"Of course. Guys, I'm stupid enough to agree to make a movie like Lockout, what makes you think I'm not too stupid to eat paper?"

"Good point. Hey, where's the glue?"