BANG-BANG: UNLOCKED IS RUINED BY A HALF-COCKED PLOT
Noomi Rapace gives it her best shot as a traumatised agent, but Unlocked is ruined by a half-cocked plot
Unlocked feels like a thriller that has spent its entire budget and used up all its creativity by the end of about the 25th minute. Which is something of a disaster as there are still another 73 to go. Getting to the end is a long, unrewarding but unintentionally quite funny – and, yes, I do mean you, Orlando Bloom – old slog.
It’s such a shame as, until the moment when it suddenly drops off a cliff, quality-wise, it had looked perfectly promising, as you’d expect from director Michael Apted, whose long career includes the Bond film The World Is Not
Enough. Spies rushing around London – which is essentially what Unlocked is – should be just up his street. Especially given the resources he has to play with.
There’s Noomi Rapace playing Alice, a traumatised CIA agent who’s hoping to get her career and life back on track by going deep undercover as a London council worker secretly trawling for terrorists. Then there’s Michael Douglas as her slightly inappropriate agency mentor who knows what happened in Paris wasn’t her fault. Heck, there’s even a twitchy John Malkovich being really rather good and really rather funny as the CIA boss who can’t quite believe the London station has made such a mess of a simple kidnapping and interrogation.
Unlocked has all this… and yet it goes so badly wrong you’ll be stifling the giggles well before the end. So what goes so awry? It certainly doesn’t help that two of these three key elements go missing for a large chunk of the running time, leaving Rapace – whose character is clearly meant to resemble a female Jason Bourne – to anchor the film in a way that, as yet, she’s not really up to. Still, she gives it her best shot, as Alice is suddenly summoned to interrogate the freshly abducted intermediary between
a radical imam and a ‘trust fund jihadi’.
The real damage to the film is done, however, by the extraordinary entrance of Orlando Bloom, who arrives in the unlikely shape of a burglar who Alice bumps into as she rushes to a supposedly ‘safe’ house. Until that moment, Unlocked has at least aspired to be a serious and reasonably wellplotted thriller and then, suddenly, there’s Bloom giving it the old twinkly eyed, aren’t-I-good-looking-under-this-balaclava, London-geezer ‘charm’, and it’s a different film altogether. A much poorer film.
It’s a film in which top-secret phone calls are overheard because the person making them is shouting so loudly that the by now tied-up burglar can knock over a nearby phone and listen in full on the extension.
It’s a film in which Peter O’Brien’s hitherto competent screenplay suddenly has to include lines such as ‘Sounds like there’s some serious s*** about to go down’ and ‘Yeah, but most people didn’t lose their best mate in the 7/7 Tube bombings.’
Yes, yes, Apted and O’Brien can argue that there is eventual justification for such dialogue but, by then, it’s too late: the damage is done. We’ve started giggling, we’re no longer taking the film seriously and, as for Bloom – his professional reputation enhanced not a single jot – he’s picked up his cheque and gone, in what turns out to be a cameo.
Inevitably, given the difficult times we live in, the urban terrorist thriller has become a contemporary cinema staple and, as a result, you have to work really hard – and intelligently – to make yours stand out.
And this – with its increasingly clumsy plot twists and frankly ridiculous dénouement – just doesn’t, at least not for the right reasons.
The central plot is similar to the recent feature film version of Spooks and elsewhere there are distinct echoes of the 2015 Pierce Brosnan thriller Survivor, in which Milla Jovovich played the much-pursued female protagonist, and of the recent Riz Ahmed film City Of Tiny Lights.
But most of all this is a film that, deludedly, would like to establish Alice as a female Jason Bourne and even has the misplaced confidence to set itself up for a sequel.
To which I respond with just three words. No, thank you.
‘It feels like a thriller that spent all its budget and used up all its creativity by the 25th minute’