Premise: A couple in self-quarantine and about to break up decide to pull a diamond heist.
Thanks to Covid, I'm going to have to better define one of my favorite types of movies. In general, I'm a fan of the idea of putting some interesting characters in a room together and seeing how they bounce off each other. It works in mystery movies like Clue or an Agatha Christie adaptation. It works from a dumb action movie like Free Fire. It works for a supernatural romance dramedy like The One I Love. I'm also a fan of limited perspective and/or digital storytelling. Just looks at my affection for found footage horror or Searching. So, you'd think Covid would bring on a golden age of these movies. The results so far though have been very underwhelming.
Take Locked Down for instance. On paper, it sounds like it could be kind of great. It's Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor acting against each other for the better part of two hours. It's directed by Doug Liman, who isn't a top tier favorite director of mine, but he is a very effective and versatile director. He could adapt to Covid limitations well, probably. It's a sort of heist comedy, which Hathaway excelled at in Ocean's 8.
There's a definite difference between a movie made around standard limitations and one made around Covid limitations. No one wants to look at Zoom meetings. Unless the joke is about the video quality, I want crystal clear footage filmed with a real camera that I pretend is a Zoom meeting. Unless the whole movie is being shot in a found footage style, then I cannot forgive below average picture quality. A non-Covid movie would've actually filmed these cameos rather than get them done on the cheap like this. I understand the limitation, but I don't have to like it. Also, no one has cracked the code of making people stuck in their homes for Covid interesting. Especially when they are really nice homes. I know, all people get bored stuck in the house but I don't want to see it when they have twice as many rooms as I have. There hasn't been enough time to reflect on all this properly, so it ends up being characters having the exact same discussions and observations about being stuck inside all the time. Given that I'm still stuck in my house most of the time and the world is still eerily shut down in a lot of ways, it's just too early to want to see other people doing the same thing.
And, there are aspects of the movie that don't work in a completely non-COVID way. The first hour is interminable and meandering. It could've been covered in about 15 minutes. Hathaway and Ejiofor broke up but are stuck in the house together still because Covid happened at the same time as the breakup. They are annoying each other. Hathaway is frustrated by how the company she works for is treating their employees. Ejiofor has an uncertain future because of legal trouble from a decade before. He used to be wilder, and while she wanted him to settle down, she doesn't like him settled down now. It's a lot of them bickering for far too long. It's a really unpleasant movie for so long early on that by the time it started to dig itself out of the hole, the hole was too deep. There's also just a lot of busy details. I couldn't figure out what the movie was trying to do for so long. Ejiofor has his legal trouble and employment problems. Hathaway has her career malaise. She's hiding her smoking. He's trying poppies from the back yard. She had an affair with a female friend the year before*. He's selling his motorcycle. She's secretly buying his motorcycle back for him. He's reading poems in the street for their neighbors (who actually appreciate it, inexplicably). And I haven't even gotten to the diamond heist.
*How much longer will movies be able to get away with the idea that if a woman sleeps with a man, she cheated, if a man sleeps with a man, he's gay and cheated, but if a woman sleeps with a woman, it's hot and played for laughs at worst?
The diamond heist is what the movie is actually being sold on, which is part of the problem. How many people will be like me, turning it on for a heist movie, and sitting through an hour of a couple arguing about leftover holiday tinsel on the ceiling before getting to anything about the heist? It's a shame too, because I liked the movie a lot more around then. Even when they are still in the house in the planning stage, the movie is much livelier. Hathaway brings this great scattered funny energy. I finally start seeing how the two were a functional couple for so long. It's such a freaking relief when they finally leave the house to pull off the heist. It's odd when they get to these extra-filled scenes at Harrods because I started asking "so this production could get actual people for scenes this whole time?" I love how simple the actual heist is. They don't need to be seasoned criminals to pull it off, and the movie get a surprising amount of mileage out of a joke about no one recognizing the name Edgar Allan Poe.
Had this movie been a tight 90 minutes (or even a little less) rather than almost 2 hours, with most of the extra time cut off the beginning, this could've been a really fun Covid curio. Instead, it's really tedious for the first hour and picks up some in the last hour but not enough to make the whole thing worth it.
Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend
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