Unlocked (Theaters-2017; Streaming-2017) Rated: R Runtime: 98 minutes
Genre: Action-Mystery-Suspense-Thriller
els – 4.5/10
IMDb – 6.2/10
Amazon – 4.1/5 stars
Rotten Tomatoes Critics – 4.3/10
Rotten Tomatoes Audience – 3.5/5
Metacritic Metascore – 46/100
Metacritic User Score – 6.1/10
Directed by: Michael Apted
Written by: Peter O’Brien
Music by: Stephan Barton
Cast: Noomi Rapace, Orlando Bloom, Michael Douglas, John Malkovich
Film Locations: Prague, Czech Republic; London, England
Budget: NA
A PTSD undercover CIA agent, Alice Racine (Rapace), assigned to a desk job in the immigrant slums of London, unlocks, or extracts information from an Islamic currier that has the potential to bring unfathomable terror to London and the world. The information she obtains is immediately compromised by a mole inside the CIA, and thus, begins a shoot ’em up race to find the mole and stop the terrorists from releasing a deadly biologic agent into the city population.
An all-star cast, along with an accomplished director: Apted, give their all to make something out of an incredibly predictable, misguided and sophomoric screenplay, but in the end it isn’t enough. When Eric Lasch (Douglas) makes an appearance early in the movie, you can get up and leave, the general outline of the movie is writ large and by continuing to watch the show you only gain the details and a headache.
Peter O’Brien is wholly responsible for this mixed up attempt of a spy thriller. If he had written this story without a Hollywood PC twist it may have worked, but instead his fantasy world beliefs make a total and unbelievable mess of the plot. This script makes some sense when you realize that O’Brien’s previous efforts included writing scripts for video games; his greatest credit being for Microsoft’s Halo: Reach. What doesn’t make sense is how any one paid money to turn this script into a movie. Hopefully after this fiasco he will leave the movie business, and return to the realm of first person shooter games where the story is buried beneath the body count.
The novel and movie begin near the final gasps of communism in the late 20th century along with subsequent fall of the wall separating Berlin from East Berlin. A British spy, possessing a list of every spy playing spook in Berlin is killed and the list disappears. Lorraine Broughton (Theron), a British MI6 operative is brought in to recover the list, kick a few butts, possibly chase down a double agent, and segue with feminine ease through the twists and turns of this wonderfully sculpted action thriller.
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