Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.0

Gridlocked Blu-ray Movie Review

Bullets Over Canada

Reviewed by Michael Reuben June 16, 2016

Gridlocked is the second feature by Canadian writer/director Allan Ungar, who wanted to emulate the style of action movies that inspired him growing up, especially the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon franchises. According to Wikipedia, which is backed up on this point by press notes from the film's distributor, Magnolia Pictures, Gridlocked set a record for onscreen gunfire in a Canadian film, but that doesn't mean much to a 2016 audience accustomed to decades of Hollywood overkill. Gridlocked dutifully racks up scene after scene of gunplay and martial arts (the latter being familiar territory to Ungar from his first feature, the MMA-themed Tapped Out), but ultimately it's a tame affair.

With some minor tinkering, Gridlocked borrows the central device of John Badham's The Hard Way, where a veteran cop is ordered to babysit a spoiled movie star. Here, the cop is David Hendrix (Dominic Purcell), the leader of an NYPD SWAT team, who is impatiently waiting out a medical suspension after being shot on the job. The movie star is Brody Walker (Cody Hackman, an alumnus of director Ungar's first feature), who needs to rehabilitate his image with some community service after punching out a reporter.

Hackman's Brody is convincing enough as a shallow narcissist, but Purcell doesn't have the flair that James Woods brought to the equivalent part in Badham's film. Instead of externalizing his frustration, Purcell's Hendrix is a stolid, interior figure who suffers mostly in silence, lacking the dynamism of Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson or even Steven Seagal (before he began phoning in his performances). The failure of the Brody/Hendrix interplay to generate sparks saps Gridlocked of energy even before the mismatched pair find themselves caught up in a siege of a police training facility that becomes the film's Nakatomi Plaza. Hendrix has taken Brody there to meet his SWAT team (Steve Byers, James A. Woods and former WWE wrestler Trish Stratus), when the installation is attacked by commandos led by Korver, whose identity and motive are only gradually revealed. In yet another callback to The Hard Way, Korver is played by Stephen Lang, the same actor who filled the villain's role in the earlier film. (Today he's best known as Col. Quaritch in Avatar.)

Despite the best efforts of the weapons coordinators and stuntpeople, Gridlocked never rises above its antecedents, because Ungar never stamps either the players or the caper with enough distinctiveness to give the film its own identity. You watch with academic detachment, cataloguing the plot devices lifted from other, better films. Seize control of a nearby structure as a base of operations? Die Hard 2. Summarily execute an innocent pair of elderly bystanders? Broken Arrow. Rob a police facility? Lethal Weapon 3. The list goes on. In what may be Gridlocked's biggest miscalculation, Danny Glover, Lethal Weapon's own Sgt. Murtagh, appears as the senior security guard who serves as the police facility's gatekeeper. When Ungar has Glover utter a variation on Murtagh's signature phrase ("I'm too old", etc.) at a critical juncture in the plot, it doesn't work as a homage. It just takes you out of the movie.

Ungar might have done better if he'd pursued his notion of making a Canadian action film to its logical conclusion and invented a story set in a Canadian city with Canadian cops, villains and motivations. Gridlocked is nominally set in New York, but except for overhead establishing shots, everything about the locations and sets betrays its Toronto origins. (Not only has the production designer obviously not seen a real NYC police station, but apparently she managed never to watch Law & Order or NYPD Blue.) The films that Ungar is imitating all had an authentic sense of place—L.A. in the Lethal Weapon films and the original Die Hard; D.C. and New York in later Die Hard entries—and their everyday texture made the villains' attacks feel more deadly and intrusively real. Gridlocked exists in an artificial world that's as makeshift as the hastily erected plywood corridors of the training facility's shooting gallery. You always know you're watching a knockoff.

Gridlocked Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Gridlocked was shot digitally by Pasha Patriki, who worked with director Ungar on his first film, Tapped Out. According to IMDb, the cameras were Red One and Red Epic. Magnolia Home Entertainment's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray was presumably sourced directly from digital files and accurately represents the original cinematography. Despite the usual virtues of digital capture—sharp focus, superior detail and an absence of noise or interference, except for some occasional minor banding—it's a bland image, with expansive washes of alternating blue and yellow light compensating for dull colors and an uninspired production design. Much of the film occurs at night, and the image has generally solid blacks and acceptable shadow detail. Magnolia used to be generous with its discs and bitrates, but it has opted to place the 113-minute Gridlocked on a BD-25 with 1080p extras, resulting in an average bitrate of 19.99 Mbps. They get away with it here, probably because of the digital capture, but it's a troubling trend.

Gridlocked Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Gridlocked's 5.1 sound mix, encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, achieves the basic action movie necessities of spreading gunfire throughout the sound array and punching home explosions and impacts with broad dynamic range and decent (if unremarkable) bass extension. The dialogue is clear, and the score by Jacob Shea, who has worked as an arranger, engineer and additional composer on numerous Hollywood productions, hits the action beats effectively, if not memorably. (Many of the films that Ungar is attempting to emulate were scored by the late Michael Kamen, who had the gift of creating instantly recognizable signature themes that became an integral part of the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon franchises. Kamen's is a tough act to follow.)

Gridlocked Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 2.35:1; 11:34): The eight scenes are not separately listed or selectable. The most interesting involves an additional gun battle outside the besieged training facility.



• Blooper Reel (1080p; 1.78:1; 6:03): The usual collection of mishaps and crackups.



• Kicking It Old School: The Making of Gridlocked (1080p; 1.78:1; 15:53): The director discusses his objectives, and the cast members are interviewed about their characters.



• Inside the Action (1080p; 1.78:1; 6:40): The cast and crew discuss the film's stunt work and their training.



• Also from Magnolia Home Entertainment: The disc includes trailers for The Wave and High Rise, as well as promos for the Charity Network and AXS TV.



• BD-Live: As of this writing, attempting to access BD-Live produces the message "Check back later for updates".

Gridlocked Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Bullets are fired continuously, blows are repeatedly exchanged and bodies drop in droves, but Gridlocked remains a generic and forgettable effort. Rent (or VOD) if you want to see for yourself.