LOCKE

Collateral meets Buried in this more serene 2013 UK drama starring Tom Hardy. Ian Locke is a man driving in his car one night, a night that will change everything. The drive consists of him having to make a series of phone calls as he heads towards his destination. Now, you may ask, can someone really make a cinematic story out of just a guy driving a car while making phone calls? Locke answers that question with a resounding reply. This is what differentiates the men from the boys, for this is a film amidst a world of mere movies.

Directed and written by Steven Knight, most well-known for Eastern Promises, Knight truly puts the audience in the concrete-crusted shoes of Ian Locke, a successful construction manager who is driving the opposite direction from the biggest concrete-laying of his career. Ian Locke has always gotten the job done, and has always been a good, family man. But tonight, he faces the consequences of a mistake he made less than a year earlier, and he has made his choice in response, driving towards it to pay penance for his wrong-doing to redeem his family’s fucked-up legacy.

As the audience, you get to sit there with Ian Locke in his car, filled with his inner demons and his desperate attempts to make the right decision. All he can do is call upon the aid of others, and put his hope and trust in them to create the best outcome. But this car ride is a wrestling with the flaws of humanity, and you’re never quite sure how the car ride will end. The road he drives on is not the concrete he so loves and trusts in; a dependable, unflinching material that you can create grand achievements from. For he has always been concrete, always the reliable one; but tonight, as he reminisces on his one mistake, he recognizes that one crack can ruin the entire foundation of the greatest building. It is his one mistake that threatens to tear his entire world down.

The beautiful soundtrack is composed by Dickon Hinchliffe (Out of the Furnance, Winter’s Bone), and it is the music that truly complements Tom Hardy’s acting and cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos’ (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, Thor) simple but eerie style. It is a modest film with a whole lot to say in profound and genuine ways. Normally I’m an once and done kind of guy in relation to movies. Typically once you’ve experienced a movie, the magic is dispensed with the fading of the mystery. However, I would say that this film is a journey worth experiencing again, simply because its messages hit the heart in a quiet way with a slow tension that many movies just don’t do anymore.

I love to write short reviews, because it means I have nothing critical to say about the pace. I give it 5 stars, and probably one of the best films I’ve seen this year. My one critique?: It's more of a drama than the thriller the trailer makes it out to be. Enjoy :)