"LOCKED" (2025) Is All Brakes, No Gas (REVIEW)

Are vigilante movies considered horror? That’s a tricky question and one that, most likely, depends on the viewer's ethics. In 1974, Michael Winner directed Charles Bronson to the height of fame with “Death Wish.” Most critics despised it, but it was a resounding smash with audiences, generating $22 million at the box office on a $3 million budget. Manhattan was a rough town back in 74’, and crowds flocked to theaters for the visceral thrill of seeing frontier justice dolled out on Hollywood’s interpretation of urban baddies. Fast forward ten years into the Reagan administration, both one and two, and you have the same formula, with Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Seagal, and Van Damme kick-punching their way through various street thugs, drug dealers, and the occasional mercenary army. It's the same frontier justice and the same exaggerated body count, but the interesting part is that the 80s did away with any semblance of moral quandary and went straight to cartoon mayhem. Audiences didn’t need to see urban decay or the tortured rationalizations of the protagonist. The “what” and “why” were removed, and theatergoers just wanted the “how.”

Would it be a steam pipe through the chest, an explosive arrow blasting a henchman in two, or a knife pummelled through the top of Tommy Lee Jones’ head? We essentially ditched the messy ethics of vengeance (there are scores of Greek myths that caution against this, by the way) and went straight for the jugular, literally. Fast forward to 2025, and we come full circle back to questioning the morality of vengeance and its toll on those involved with David Yarovesky’s, ‘Locked,” a remake of Mariano Cohn’s “4x4” from Argentina. This film essentially copies the original blueprint, but like almost every stateside remake of a previously made international feature, waters down every single aspect that made the original stand out in the first place. (See “Martyrs,” “The Wicker Man,” “Quarantine,” “Pulse,” “The Grudge,” “The Vanishing,” etc etc.) Without the abrasive, uncomfortable, in-your-face tone and rhythm of the original, we’re dumbfounded as to why this movie was remade in the first place. Who is this movie for? Why would a lesser version need to be made?

SYNOPSIS:  

Eddie Barrish (Bill Skarsgård) is a down-on-his-luck loser in desperate need of $400 to get his delivery van out of the repair shop so he can make money to support his daughter. Seeing the opportunity for a quick score, he breaks into a luxury SUV owned by  William (Anthony Hopkins), an affluent doctor bent on dolling out vigilante justice, only to discover that he can’t escape the car. He soon learns that this was a trap to exact revenge, and the sentence is death.

WHAT WORKS:

Yarovesky (“Brightburn,” “Nightbooks”) does an admirable job shooting in the close quarters of the SUV. Cinematographer Michael Dallatorre (“Studio 666”) also deserves credit for this. The camera work mimics Eddie's escalating anxiety and works exceptionally well, dialing up the tension with creative angles, edits, and movement. Skarsgård does a fine job showing Eddie’s limited but evident layers. His character is a bit of a mess, onscreen and on the page, but he manages to break through the cliched stereotypes, for the most part. Although barely more than a caricature, Skarsgård makes Eddie interesting, which should be commended because this is almost an entirely physical performance. The dialogue and exchanges we get are a huge part of the problem with this film. That aside, the film is never dull. Even with all its flaws, the audience we saw this film with was engaged the entire time, laughing at Hopkin’s taunts and giddily reacting to the violence that happens as Eddie’s situation increasingly becomes more dire. 

That’s the heartbreak of a remake like this. It can dazzle with an expansion of what came before. Instead, it chooses to water down all aspects that made the film impressive. We’ll give the director some cover here; we looked for evidence of reshoots or studio interference but could find none. We looked because this film is simply toothless in almost every way. It’s doubtful there would be any studio interference with Sam Raimi as one of the producers, but you can never be sure. Twenty-eight people are listed as either producers or executive producers for “Locked.” Having numerous producers on a movie is not out of the ordinary, but twenty-eight is a lot of opinions. To give you a frame of reference, three of the best films of 2024, “Oddity,” “The Substance,” and “Exhuma,” had twelve, seven, and two. That said, it’s entirely possible the director had a vision closer to the original in mind and was given contradictory instructions from the sheer number of people involved in making this feature. It’s certainly not unheard of.

WHAT  DOESN’T WORK:

It boils down to intention, or lack of, in this case. Cohn’s “4x4” introduces a despicable character, a lowlife with few redeeming qualities, and tries to get the audience to side with him as an antagonist tortures him, which the audience will most likely feel justified at first. It’s a morality play where the further the torture escalates, the more an audience, hopefully, begins to question the ends justifying the means. In “Locked,” the game is rigged. Instead of Eddie presented as the despicable lowlife we’re meant to assume he is, which is supported by scenes of him boosting a wallet and trying to get into locked cars, we immediately get scenes of Eddie sweetly joking with his daughter on the phone, and giving a dog locked in a vehicle some water. Let’s rip the bandaid off and call it what this and almost every remake of an international feature eventually turns out to be: the homogenized Americanized dumbing down of provocative content. The people who made “Locked” have no faith in their audience. Eddie has to be presented as essentially good, and William has to be presented as a cartoon baddie, which he eventually turns out to be. This kind of film is insulting on so many levels because the filmmaker tells you, the audience, “I’ll do the thinking for you.” Where’s the ambition, the experimentation, the guts to make a genre film that challenges the viewer to confront uncomfortable feelings about justice and retribution? They had the chance to make a movie that was more than the sum of its parts and purposefully chose to make it less than.

SUMMARY:  

Many talented people were involved in making this film. To end up with what’s onscreen here is confounding, to say the least. If you’re going to make a feature that presents hot-button issues like society's role in crime, punishment, generational bias, financial inequality, and the government's role as protector or abuser, you need to push the boundaries as far as they can go, regardless of how they’ll eventually think of your protagonists or the film itself (see the 2022 Christian Tafdrup film, “Speak No Evil”). If you’re unwilling to do that, you shouldn’t be remaking it.  

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