Locked

As a genre exercise, I enjoyed it a lot.

Filmmaker David Yarovesky and writer Michael Arlen Ross have lots of tricks up their sleeves, including arguments about Marx and Dostoyevsky, not to mention actors who don't need to be in the same space to raise gooseflesh.

A film like “Locked” lives and dies by its ability to entertain us with images of a man banging on tinted windows for help while he faces the prospect of being hurled off the roof of a parking garage. And on that, it delivers.

“Locked” is not without limited charms, but it ultimately fails to bridge the gap between putting audiences in the car with Eddie, and actually wanting to make them go for the ride.

“Locked” starts promisingly, and then almost refuses to really go anywhere, trapped by its own concept and unwillingness to do anything thematically richer than “wealthy people be crazy.”

It all makes for one wild ride and gives both actors the perfect vehicle to showcase their talents.

A compact, tense movie with only five speaking parts, this effective thriller taps a bit into contemporary cultural divides and social anxiety to make the most of its cat-and-mouse game.

Locked isn’t unique if you’ve seen 4×4, but it also goes in unexpected directions. It’s a lot like the Steven Knight-written and directed drama Locke starring Tom Hardy took one of the violently pumping gears out of Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof.

There is only so much you can do with two unlikable characters in a car despite game actors. Claustrophobia is lost thanks to both spaciousness and fisheyes and the film barely has time to make its case against class warfare.

To the correct audience, however, Locked is a pretty accurate depiction of where we are right now. A populace beholden to the whims of an oligarchy setting obvious traps to justify its own violence.