Locke **** (2013, Tom Hardy) – Movie Review

British screenwriter/director Steven Knight (in his second film after 2013’s Hummingbird, aka Redemption) provides a brilliant tour-de-force role for Tom Hardy as the sole star of a film entirely set inside a car on its journey from Birmingham to Croydon.

On the eve of Ivan Locke’s biggest job yet, nine years of successful life as a top construction boss go out of the window through a series of phone calls made while he’s driving. His carefully constructed middle-class private and professional lives simultaneously implode.

Locke plans to keep a fateful unexpected appointment that will mean him abandoning his wife and two kids for the night, as well as missing a crucial early-morning meet with 218 trucks of wet concrete for his latest spectacular building. Meanwhile he’s having imaginary conversations with his long deceased father.

His fake Welsh accent apart, Hardy pulls off the remarkable trick of being mesmerising with the camera up his nose for 85 minutes. It must be tricky, too, playing a man as ordinary as middle-ageing, concrete-obsessed building site manager Ivan Locke, and making him interesting, involving and riveting, but Hardy does triumphantly.

Knight succeeds in making it real, taut, suspenseful and gripping, turning a little personal drama into a proper big-screen thriller. Knight comes up with catchy situations and writes very good, credible dialogue. Those are his main strengths.

The women’s roles on the cell phones are surprisingly unsympathetic, and not nearly as well played. But you can’t have everything. The car-headlight/ streetlamp-strewn noirish night filming on the eerie empty motorways is a big, atmospheric plus, valuably adding to the effect of changing the film from a drama to a thriller.

Filmed in just eight nights on a low budget, Locke was a hit at 2013’s 57th London Film Festival, standing out from the crowd.

Olivia Colman, Ruth Wilson and Tom Holland are among the voice cast.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Movie Review

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com

Tom Hardy and Steven Knight at a press event for Locke.