Review of Locke (2014) by Michael P — 28 Jul 2017

I had to stop 21 minutes into this film, screaming repeatedly at the screen, "I don't buy it!" Not only was I not emotionally invested in the character or story by this point, but I couldn't understand why a man would jeopardise his future, his family, the livelihood of his colleagues, and the lives of potentially countless other people on the biggest building project of his life to go sit by the bedside of a woman he barely knows, who phones him up that day to confess that she is about to give birth to his child after a one-off act of infidelity in his fifteen year marriage.

I don't care what his father did or didn't do for him as a child. He has two doting boys of his own now and a loving wife waiting at home. So, it's not as if he's got that much to prove to himself or has any real pressing need to expunge lurking demons from the past as the script laboriously tries to have us believe.

It all sounds pretty good on paper, when as a writer you try to connect the dots, but it doesn't strike me as very believable or even plausibly something that the character on screen would do. I don't buy it.

"Locke" reminded me of an overworked script by British playwright David Hare, where the other woman would in the end tell our hero that she's been pulling his leg all along. I know that it's possibly unfair of me to pass judgement in this way without finishing the thing, but maybe one rainy day I'll get around to watching the rest of it.