Locke

Locke comes across as if you were filming, in real time with hidden cameras, the car ride of a man on the telephone dealing with a tricky life situation that could turn his successful professional and personal life upside down in the course of a single night. It is a situation that tests him on the character level, shaped by his difficult childhood, and on the professional level, in maintaining ambition in his responsibility for successfully carrying through an important social cause. It is also as if he is a charismatic man whose emotions and dilemmas you understand and sympathize with. Then all you have to do is edit it down to a smoothly running 85 minutes and you have a gripping study of a superbly played film character. Not everyone will understand that character and not everyone would behave like him, and the film is thus also an interesting test of the viewer’s hierarchy of values. Life can be a dog, but it only takes a few tricks to make an excellent film. If you know how. (24/04/2020)

Outside of Locke, Steven Knight was the writer and director behind the ambitious but somewhat sympathetically infantile Hummingbird, starring Jason Statham, whose central motif was once again man, his principles, ineffable cyclicality, and the surrounding world, which is the enemy. The screenplay for Locke is basically brilliant, and I'll give a nipple for the fact that it was written in the introduction that film databases of the world would call the genre a thriller, of which it has some of the parameters (the action takes place almost in real time, a protagonist removed from his environment, dealing with hostility all around), but otherwise it's a pure drama about how a basically systematic protagonist decides to take an unexpected step and pragmatically carries it out according to his principles and procedures. It's terribly easy to keep a relative distance from Locke thanks to its ambition and an ending that few will probably find satisfying, except that you sort of have to admit that this is a genuinely bold move from director Steven Knight, comparable to the central character's struggle for his perceived soul. (22/09/2014)

A road movie with a depressing aftertaste. Hardy and his BMW never leave the screen and just watching the suffering in the face of the former is worth it. A self-confident person slips slowly into being a mental wreck, but you don’t find out if he goes over the edge until the end. One mistake, one road, one bad day. Donald, don’t trust God when it comes to concrete! (04/08/2014)

An excellent solo performance by Tom Hardy, who drives a car for 90 minutes and no one but him appears in the film. His life is falling apart, his mistress is giving birth, his disgraced wife is crying and vomiting, and 218 trucks are supposed to bring him as much concrete in nine hours as is needed for the largest concrete construction in the history of Europe. The dialogues take place on the level of gradually escalating telephone calls and are excellent (on the other hand, Hardy's monologues are slightly stilted and not as interesting). Formally, it's a bit like the film Buried (which entirely takes place in a coffin for a change). Director and screenwriter Steven Knight was able to handle a difficult topic extremely well, and with the small space given to him he played out a fully functional and realistic drama that is a lot of fun the entire time (and has its funny moments). (04/07/2014)

On a minimum of space, there are quite a lot of emotions, for which, rather than the clumsy script (hysterics on the phone, talking to oneself in the rearview mirror?), the great Tom Hardy is responsible. Then there is also the best advertisement for the BMW multimedia interface in recent years and a few neon lights taken digitally to give it atmosphere. But there is no reason to dwell on it too much. It lacks "substance" and it’s far from solid. (28/06/2015)