One man and his car. The man’s name is Ivan Locke and his life is going to change completely during an hour and a half trip in his car while he talks on the phone via Bluetooth with several people. Soon we discover the destiny of the road trip and throughout the film we understand and follow this man’s issues.
Tom Hardy is an actor of excellence – even before I saw the film I already knew that he would give all of him, as he always does. The film is not quite a monologue, but is close to it since the only character we see is Hardy’s. He always shows the right emotions no matter the difficulty of the role, and this was hard work. He has the capacity of keeping us interested and using the right tension and despair he is able to carry the film. We really feel connected with Ivan Locke. This guy needs more praise than he gets, so underrated and so great!
This film is definitely good, but unfortunately we do not see what it sells in the trailer. For me, “Locke” was a solid drama, but not an exciting thriller. We watch a man trying to do the right thing. Against what his heart wants, he believes that he needs to assume a mistake, not to be haunted by ghosts of the past that lead to unhappy memories of childhood and adolescence. Another thing that bothered me in the story was the writer’s (which is also the director of this film, Steve Knight) insistence on what I am going to call the “concrete talk.” I understand that he wanted to prove Ivan Locke is very passionate about his work and, since concrete is used for the foundations of buildings (which you will understand at some point of the story), why the “base of a structure” is a very important key and metaphor of the film – and why Locke is so obsessed with it. However, I felt that I didn’t need so much of that talk over and over again.
The best thing about it (Tom Hardy’s performance apart) is that besides caring about the main and only character we see on-screen, it made me also cared about all of the other characters and we never see them! We feel their emotions and that was really cool.
“Locke” is definitely a different film with an interesting cinematography and editing. Doing a film only set in a car on a highway is not an easy thing to do; and not even because of that we feel less power, but the misleading plot might be your major disappointment.
– by Caty Alexandre
