Locked Down Review

• 7th Mar 2011

Locked Down has a dirty secret. It is not a movie at all – it’s one of the world’s longest, most boring, poorly scripted commercials. The product placement for the mixed martial arts merchandisers and some-time film producers Tapout is all over the place, and for that alone Lo-Do scores well below zero on a scale of nought to zilch. If you’ve seen any of Van Damme’s vintage stuff (or, indeed, any martial arts film) then you already know the basic plot of “man must fight multiple challengers in order to win his freedom/life”, but be aware that there are plenty of spoilers lurking ahead. Just skip to the end of this review if you care whether or not there’s girl-on-girl action in it.

At least the blatant advertorial content explains Lo-Do’s existence – without it you’d be convinced that it had been made solely to make use of a disused factory and a lot of fencing wire that someone had left over. Either that, or it was conceived by some mouth-breathing lump who thought: “What if The Shawshank Redemption had been a cage fighting film, with lots of product placement, and it totally blew chunks?” This, my friends, is the answer.

To successfully pretend that Lo-Do was meant to be a real film requires being 100% more imaginative than anyone involved in its creation. It has never had an original thought pass through its meaty little head.

The script might have been pieced together using random subtitles from 70s kung fu films and The Big Book of Clichés, but that would credit the writers with some effort. Even Ian McKellan would struggle with material that could be used as an argument for giving up on language altogether, so there is no hope for star Tony Schiena, an actor so limited in range that he can’t even wear a t-shirt with conviction. Did I say star? Forgive me, I meant to say black hole. Schiena is massive and he also really sucks. His appalling lack of talent doesn’t stick out though. During the more agonising bits of poor acting, i.e. all of them, the pain could be somewhat relieved by closing your eyes and imagining that the dialogue was being delivered by the puppets from Team America.

The plot, such as it is, is Danny (Schiena) is an honest undercover cop who is framed by crime boss Anton Vargas (Vinnie Jones). Vargas engineers it so that he and Danny wind up in the same prison, where Vargas runs a lucrative fight club with the collusion of the prison guards, including the governor, all of the prisoners and – so we’re told – a large number of people on the outside who bet on the outcomes of the fights. In fact, it’s so successful that Vargas has managed to get franchises going in other prisons! It’s all literally unbelievable.

Danny is first glimpsed beneath a Joan Jett-style party wig, trying to pass himself off as a coke dealer to the world’s smallest motorcycle gang. The four of them hang out in a disused warehouse that looks a hell of a lot like the prison where Danny will later do his lag. While two of the bikies try to convince Danny to actually do a line of coke, the other two put some half-hearted effort into cheering on a bored stripper. This is the first of many, many instances of gratuitous female nudity in the otherwise exclusively male world of Lo-Do. (The female prison guard is subjected to a vicious and misogynistic visual metaphor during a fight scene, when there’s a close-up of her face as she’s splattered with blood.)

After a bit of a shoot out, characterised by surprising ineptitude on both sides, Danny drops a bloke on his head and then goes home for rumpy pumpy with his girlfriend, who is miffed that Danny spends so much time convincingly inhabiting the skins of other people that she doesn’t even know who he is any more. If only. After a sex scene that manages to be 200 times less erotic than a detailed description of your boss’s hernia operation and 300 times more uncomfortable to endure, Danny wakes up alone. His day worsens when he is arrested by some hard nut who accuses him of shaming the memory of his father and grandfather … both of whom were cops.

In a maximum security prison with only two guards, Danny meets his mentor, Irving, an elderly black man who schools Danny on life inside. He’s also a mixed martial arts guru. Irving is intended to be the stock character Spike Lee once contemptuously dismissed as “the super-duper magical negro”, except that Lo-Do can’t manage either super-duper or magical, so he’s just a super-annoying stater of the obvious. He gets lines like “I have a bad feeling about this”, “Damn boy, looks like you got some moves” and “I’m too old for this shit”. At least Irving is always distinct. When Schiena mumbles “I fought in the cage”, it comes out as “I fart in the cage”. Who knows? Maybe that’s what he did say.

Irving is there to assure Danny that, contrary to what he might have expected, former cops are not very popular in jail, that prisoners self-segregate by race, and that the custard in the canteen is best avoided. When Irving is shot dead trying to escape, it’s a wonder that he doesn’t muster enough strength to mutter “Damn, I’m shot and I’m gonna die!” before expiring.

In fact, Irving’s only notable contribution is a pithy summing up of everything that’s wrong with Lo-Do. Teaching Danny a method of Japanese martial art called Wu Shu, he explains it means ‘no mind’. How apt. To compound the dumbness of this, a quick Google reveals that Wu Shu is actually Chinese for ‘martial art’.

Director Daniel Zirilli is the veteran of over 250 music videos and doesn’t even bother trying to direct an actual movie here. There’s a lot of generic hip-hop and nu-metal on the soundtrack and Zirilli takes his cue from that: not that you can blame him when the plotting, script and acting give him bugger all to work with. You can blame him for the stunning ineptitude he brings to the stuff he can control. A fight movie should have decent fights, but they’re filmed with such cack-handedness and lack of pacing that they may as well have been recorded on a cheap mobile phone.

Locked Down is so dire that even Vinnie Jones deserves better than this, but maybe that’s only because he now bears an unsettling physical resemblance to Morrissey. Avoid this sorry excuse for a movie at all costs.

*There is a catfight in this film, but it is brief, and fully-clothed. Like everything else about Locked Down, it’s a let down.

Clare Moody