‘Lockout’ is to ‘Escape from New York’ as Frank Stallone is to Sylvester Stallone. Similar in design, but somehow inferior in all measurable aspects.

To say ‘Lockout’ is derivative is a bit of an insult to all of the superior movies it’s cobbled together from. The central plot will be familiar to everyone who saw ‘Escape from New York’. The protagonist is heavily cribbed from John McClain in the ‘Die Hard’ movies. The film’s energy level is clearly jacked from some kind of corporate training movie. Hot garbage in every direction.

Guy Pearce is Snow, a vaguely defined badass who gets wrongfully imprisoned in the first few minutes. When the president’s daughter is taken hostage aboard a low-earth-orbit prison complex, he’s offered the chance to earn his freedom by rescuing her. Armed with only a gun, a couple of explosive devices and a metric shit-ton of awful one-liners, he must best hundreds of escaped killers, save a friend of his who has the key to his appeal and bring back the president’s pretty but insufferable daughter. He does it, mostly by insulting the audience’s intelligence.

The special effects are awful, too. The worst moment is the part where Snow jumps on one of those weird motorcycles from ‘Priest’ to escape some sort of police spaceship. For reasons entirely opaque to me, this entire scene looks like it’s the placeholder for some better scene the effects crew never got to. The same can be said for Maggie Grace’s entire performance. The whole thing looks and feels unfinished and poorly thought through. If you manage to get all the way to the ‘whodunit’ at the end, I promise you’ll be astonished how stupid the clues are.

Skip it and watch ‘Escape from New York’ or ‘Die Hard’ again.