The Lockdown (2024)
Director: Ryan C Jaeger
Writers: H. Daniel Gross, Ryan C Jaeger, Stephen Niver
Stars: Michael Biehn, Caity Lotz, Leo Howard
Review : The Lockdown (2024)
The Lockdown opens in a with a scene of an anonymous inmate being executed by lethal injection in a prison somewhere in Myanmar. From there it shifts to the US and introduces us to Jack (Leo Howard, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Conan the Barbarian) and his sister Charlie (Caity Lotz, Yoga Teacher Killer: The Kaitlin Armstrong Story, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow) who are trying to settle their mother’s estate. That somehow includes the Muay Thai dojo that their father Max (Michael Biehn, Aliens, Red Handed) used to run, and the deed to which is still in his name.
They need him to sign it over to Jack, who’s been running it in his absence, but there’s a small problem, he’s in jail. In jail in the worst prison in Myanmar, the one we saw in the prologue, no less. But rather than getting a lawyer to handle it, the siblings decide to fly over there and try to persuade him to sign it over in person. Needless to say, he’s anything but cooperative.
Actually Max isn’t doing bad for himself in the big house, Warden Cetan (Hon Ping Tang, Iron Sky: The Coming Race, The Fifth Element) has been running tournaments, broadcast over an app to paying customers with Max as his matchmaker. He offers Max his freedom if he can help break the app globally, something that will take foreign fighters to do, and Max knows two well-trained Americans he can offer up.
Director Ryan C Jaeger (Kung Fu, Games, Pleasant Canyon) co-wrote the script with H. Daniel Gross, with whom he’d collaborated on Art of Eight Limbs, which wasn’t exactly a good sign. Their script was given a rewrite by Stephen Niver whose credits include Porky’s IV: Pimpin’ Pee Wee and Shark Swarm, which didn’t inspire much hope for The Lockdown either.
Now we’ve seen variations on this theme in everything from In Hell and The System to the Penitentiary and Undisputed franchises. With all of these films to use as a template, you would think the filmmakers would at least have an idea of what to do. And you would be wrong for thinking that.
The film runs an hour and fifty-two minutes, and it takes nearly an hour of that to get down to business when the cons running the yard try to shake Jack down. After some more talk, we get a rerun of it with Charlie and some female inmates. It’s all very predictable and by the numbers, with nothing to engage the viewers outside of the two fights.
Up until then, there’s almost no action, apart from Charlie taking care of a couple of muggers in the opening scenes and quick glimpses of one of the prison fights. Instead, there is lots of family drama and Charlie telling her co-worker Wells (Ron Weaver, The Creator, Kickboxer: Retaliation) how to care for her cat while she’s gone. To be fair though, the Bolo is the most charismatic member of The Lockdown’s cast.
As with Art of Eight Limbs, the stunt coordinator for The Lockdown is Seng Kawee (Born to Fight, No Escape) and he serves up some decent, if unspectacular, fights. The problem is, there aren’t enough of them and what we get in between them is, to put it mildly, uninspired and uninvolving with everyone rather glumly going through their paces as they deliver loads of unnecessary dialogue when the script should be letting their fists and feet do the talking.
The final act adds unbelievable to uninspired, as Wells turns up at the prison looking for Jack and Charlie, sending everyone into panic mode. But by the time The Lockdown limps to an anticlimactic conclusion that utilizes one of the least believable clichés in film, you’ll just be glad that it’s over. Because while the fight scenes aren’t bad, and if the script had been trimmed down and shortened to improve the pacing, The Lockdown might have been a passable time waster. But as it stands, while it is better than Lockdown or Lockdown, there’s too much downtime and not enough action for a film that pushes the two hour mark.
Enjoy The Trailer: The Lockdown
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