Tropic Sprockets
Locke
Tom Hardy, who is known for his aggressive and usually villainous roles (Bane, of The Dark Knight Rises), is a singular force of pathos, want and frustration here. He wonderfully handles the drama with the camera watching and indeed, makes it seem effortless. Hardy is the lone star in director Steven Knight’s insular and existential film “Locke.”
Hardy plays a Type A construction foreman who is rapidly going to pieces. While at first he has urges to go home to his wife Katrina, Locke resolves to attend to his one-time mistress Bethan, who is in the middle of having his baby at a London hospital. Though he falls short of professing his love for her, he feels bound to her and as she is needy and more than a bit fragile, Locke steels himself. In his controlling mind it is the right thing to do. After all, his name is Locke and he seals things up so that no air or wobbly emotion escapes.
To complicate matters, he resigns himself to being a no show at work as we would suspect, but his peers are only informed at the last minute and this makes for a whole heap of tempestuous tempers, given that the paperwork for Locke’s milestone building is not yet approved. The foreman’s upper crust auto becomes both an elitist life preserver and a crushing vice as events and egos expand and collapse around him with only a car phone as a transmitting beacon and anchor.
The voice of Bethan (Olivia Colman) gets increasingly anxious, while Katrina (Ruth Wilson) is devastated. Locke’s assistant Donal (Andrew Scott) is drunk and lackadaisical and his kids are too consumed by football to be much help. Borrowing icy cues from Patricia Highsmith, J.G. Ballard and Steven Spielberg’s eerie debut film “Duel,” “Locke” depicts a man in an expensive rolling prison of sorts as the camera jitters and jags with every bump, wrenching to the left and right, compensating for each curve.
As Locke is battered and jostled violently about in the car, director Knight seems to blackly parody Hardy’s usual outings as the boxer and tough guy. The man behind the wheel tries his best to pull it together but even during those instances where he is a solid rock with the uncertainty of anger surrounding him, his very teeth are transformed into abacus beads that calculate the odds, specifically of not getting his way, whether he arrives as a top dog, or a scumbag without legacy, be it a child or a building to add to his masculine name.
Locke’s BMW transcends into a Hitchcockian last refuge, a sable jet that is light and quick but oddly slow moving, a vehicle that is at first glance all speed and space, lighted like a capsule, yet stuck in the black morass of traffic and domestic argument, with all elements spiraling downward in ribbons of resentment. The night is a thread that Locke must reach to reclaim his equilibrium restoring himself as a man in power.
Stephen Knight’s success is in showing this bound man, deep in the noir of life, shut in a modern yet minimalist ark. There are no invisible Boogeymen, outside forces of evil or external dilemmas shown. Locke’s irons were made by his own weak mental hand. As a consequence, his normally strong male fingers can only perfunctorily wipe a runny nose incoming with a cold.
Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Chris Evans returns as Steve Rogers, aka “Captain America,” in a sequel to his first outing. In this film, with an obvious nod to the 1970s political thriller films, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) has made a deal with a senior SHIELD leader and military zealot Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford) to install a preemptive strike missile system worldwide. But not everything is tight and right in Avenger Land.
After a botched rescue mission involving Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Captain, Rogers contemplates giving up the Avenger team. He dons a hoodie and acts the role of civilian. While doing some errands, Nick Fury comes under a startling and epinephrine-filled attack within his impervious SUV that is worthy of a rip-roaring Saturday matinee or a whip crack by Indiana Jones. While the artillery spent is ear-numbing, the sheer invention of the onslaught is so tense that it borders the black humored and zany.
The car chase alone races along the lines of Steve McQueen and Friedkin’s “The French Connection.” With races such as these, the film directors Joe and Anthony Russo are in good company. Fury is forced to take refuge in Rogers’ pad as he is badly wounded due to what can only be described as a bone crushing. The Captain takes off after the assailant, a “winter soldier” who is three-quarters man with a metal arm (Sebastian Stan). This villain has dark goth looks reminiscent of Eric Draven in “The Crow.”
He is unstoppable. Needless to say, Captain is bereft. Gradually it comes to light that Mr. Pierce is up to no good, mad with power. Rogers and Black Widow find a secret SHIELD bunker from WWII that actually doubles as a station for neo-nazi operations. In a nice touch that echoes the cliffhangers of Spielberg and George Lucas, Black Widow ridicules the cumbersome 1960s era mainframes only to realize with an amazed horror that they pulse with a contemporary vibrance once a memory stick is inserted. Lo and behold, the wheedling and weasel-like countenance of the notorious nazi Arnim Zola (Toby Jones) appears, albeit in a crudely digital but strikingly more creepy form.
Zola remains as ever, the binary visage that you love to hate. There is a solid subplot involving the main villain’s past when he was a dear friend of Rogers during wartime that provides suspense and tension. However, when Pierce’s true colors come into play, this chapter of the red white and blue grows a little anemic with the frequently played show of uber firepower between Good and Evil. The ‘70s flavor of “Three Days of The Condor” is touched upon, but some refreshing ambiguity to balance the all too familiar war machines in the air would be well served.
In spite of this, the singular hero of Captain America is near impossible to repel. Just the sight of him scampering about in retro allure is enough to overwhelm you with an ebullience of red and navy blue. Not since the original run of “Star Wars” has there been such a buoyant, suspenseful and enjoyable group of films.
Write Ian at [email protected]
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