Something I weirdly kind of miss — to which Lockout (aka “Guy Pearce In Space Jail”) is a bit of a throwback — are the days when science-fiction and other genre films were a little disreputable. When there are no expectations for a picture to be good, one can revel a bit more in its glorious badness. This is the way to approach Lockout. It is, after all, a movie whose (anti) hero has to break into a jail, in space, whose reason for being in space is because, dude, space jail. It’s a combination of tried-and-true action movie tropes (its status as SF is nominal, coincidental, and secondary) and the beautifully conceived rhetorical question “Wouldn’t it be the raddest thing ever if the jail was in space???”
[Because it totally would!!!]