Guy Pearce is barely recognizable as Snow, a vague ex-government agent in a vague future who takes the fall in some kind of vague sting operation that went vaguely wrong. The vague officials holding him decide he's the perfect guy to to save the President's daughter (Maggie Grace), trapped on an orbital prison where vague experiments are being conducted on cryogenically frozen prisoners. The prisoners got loose and are now making vague demands, and now it's up to Snow to wander around, being told what to do from another orbital station like he's a remote controlled car and complaining about how the President's daughter just won't shut up even though she barely says anything annoying or irrelevant to the situation. It's the same annoying character relationship between Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Arterton in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, only without any actual justification for it on the screen.
If I was being favorable, I could almost call Guy Pearce's Snow character a parodically typical action hero stereotype. Gone are Pearce's sunken cheeks and leaner frame that made him seem so unique in L.A. Confidential and Memento. Pearce has never been an action star, and what Hollywood seems to telling us is that with enough trips to the gym, anyone can fill in for roles that used to exclusive to types like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone. Yes, just slap some biceps on Paul Giamatti or Kevin Kline and stand him in front of some CGI speedlines, that's the ticket.
For some reason, all the plot elements seem to be in different rooms from each other. There's the ongoing subplot of Snow trying to discover the location of the vague compromising information Snow was catering around in the sting operation, and he seems far more interested in that than the actual saving daughters plot. The actual prison break, which we are told involves hundreds of the worlds most evil prisoners, is represented by a tiny fraction of about eight, only two of which have any character to them at all. There is no apparent in-fighting for control, no splitting into several conflicting parties. While this one group of prisoners do all the hostage negotiations and executions, the rest of them are apparently standing around with their thumbs up their asses. Then there's the political squabbles going on on the second orbital base. The President is stripped of power at one point, doesn't really mean anything. There's a Star Wars trench run style scene that I honestly can't remember too much of. And I think Snow only kills one guy. Maybe two, but I think the second one was an accident.
Nobody seems to know what they want Lockout to be, nothing gels together. Die Hard had a similar setup of hostages, robberies, reluctant heroes and mystery, but all of these things were interlocked with each other, removing one element would cause the rest of fall apart. Lockout keeps these elements at arms length from each other and seems too afraid to make any of it matter.
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