Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.0

Unlocked Blu-ray Movie Review

Go ask Alice.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 9, 2018

My hunch is had Unlocked not featured a cast with several notable major stars like Noomi Rapace, John Malkovich, Toni Collette and Michael Douglas (all of whom save Rapace have either Academy Award nominations or actual statuettes in their histories), or had it not been directed by the iconic Michael Apted, the man who has famously been able to segue from the Seven Up! documentary franchise to fare at least somewhat more similar to this film like The World Is Not Enough, it might have made more of a splash than it evidently did either in the United Kingdom, where it had a brief theatrical release, or on this side of the pond, where it seemingly will be relegated to the purgatory of cable television. With a cast and director like that, expectations may simply have been raised to a point that this at least occasionally exciting if pretty derivative film couldn't support. Unlocked has a number of undeniably rote elements, but as far as what I’d term Homeland-esque thrillers go, you could do considerably worse. Rapace is on hand as CIA agent Alice Racine, a woman whose interrogation techniques made her a legend in her field until she wasn’t able to successfully crack a terrorist in time to prevent a major attack in Paris, one which resulted in multiple deaths, including several children. In typical thriller fashion, that of course has haunted Alice since, and made her shy away from actual field work, choosing instead to go undercover in a London program designed to help immigrants, where she poses as a social worker and secretly keeps an eye on the comings and goings of suspicious folks.

There’s a bit of confusion underlying the interrelationships that are just kind of plopped down in Unlocked, but the bottom line is that Alice has connections to both the CIA and MI5. In London, she frequently interacts with MI5 agent Emily Knowles (Toni Collette), though her main mentor is CIA guru Eric Lasch (Michael Douglas), who is also based in London. Back in the United States, another CIA honcho named Bob Hunter (John Malkovich) gets involved once wind (literally, due to a mister that’s involved) of a plot to decimate London with a nerve gas is uncovered. In a rather thrilling sequence, a courier delivering a message from an imam is snatched right off of his motorcycle and is “renditioned”, though the agent charged with cracking this intermediary is suddenly found dead of an assumed heart attack in a hotel pool. With no one else to turn to, the CIA decides to “recruit” Alice back into the interrogation fold.

Peter O’Brien’s screenplay starts trotting out the twists almost as soon as Alice has been introduced to the guy she is supposed to break, something she does without too much trouble. But things are not exactly as they seem (of course), which ultimately leads to Alice being out on her own (more or less, anyway — more about that in a moment), with a string of dead bodies in her wake (including one major character whose identity won’t be spoiled here). The upshot is that the American CIA folks think Alice has turned, and they become desperate to “bring her in” for debriefing. Alice on the other hand is convinced (for good reason) that it’s the CIA itself that has been compromised, and she turns to Emily for a little undercover assistance in figuring out what exactly is going on.

When Alice is directed toward a supposed safe house, she ends up “meeting cute” with a burglar named Jack Alcott (Orlando Bloom), who in one of the film’s more preposterous formulations turns out to be a highly skilled veteran with just the right skill set to assist Alice in her quest to bring down the terrorists. Of course, Jack turns out to be another “twist” waiting to happen, but one of this film’s saving graces is that there are so many duplicitous characters running around that the interweaving of subterfuge(s) almost necessitates a flowchart to keep track of.

Quite a bit of Unlocked revisits ideas and even set pieces that any fan of “terrorist thrillers” (a new, or maybe not so new, subgenre?) will most likely recognize, but the film moves along at a brisk enough pace that those just searching for a little jolt or two of adrenaline probably won’t care. It’s fun to see Rapace kicking butt so viciously throughout the film, and Malkovich also brings a kind of wry, almost comedic, sensibility to his role. There are some fitful attempts to inject actual “character” into these characters (courtesy of little throwaway elements like passing information about Alice’s troubled past), but really this film fits quite snugly into the kind of template already established by other “vigilante agent” films. It may not be overly (or even partially) innovative, but, like Alice herself, Unlocked gets the job done with a minimum of fuss and/or bother.

Note: My colleague Brian Orndorf was considerably less pleased with Unlocked than I was. You can read Brian's thoughts here.

Unlocked Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Unlocked is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. The IMDb lists a variety of both Arri and Red cameras, and the results here are smooth, sleek and typically highly detailed, though I have to say for a thriller the entire visual aesthetic of the film is actually a bit on the drab and ordinary side. One of the refreshing things is a relative lack of grading, and so the palette looks natural, if only rarely what I'd call vivid. Apted goes for some extreme close-ups, including some looks at injuries on the renditioned suspect as well as the terrorist incident in Paris, and detail levels may be squirm inducing for some in these moments. This is what I'd probably term a competent, workmanlike presentation that has no real issues but which doesn't really offer much "wow" factor, either.

Unlocked Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Unlocked features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix which, like its video component, offers a completely competent but but only occasionally really impressive mix. Both score and quite a few ambient environmental effects offer intermittent engagement of the surround channels, and things do perk up considerably in some of the skirmishes, where everything from gunfire to hand to hand combat offers good utilization of sound effects. Dialogue is also rendered cleanly and clearly on this problem free track.

Unlocked Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Making Unlocked (1080p; 13:24) is standard issue EPK fare, with interviews and snippets from the film.


• Unlocked Trailer (1080p; 2:27)

Unlocked Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

As Unlocked came to its close, I actually thought to myself, "Well, that was better than I expected it to be," which is perhaps an assessment that's the inverse of the expectation situation I described above. I guess perhaps because I've had to review so many similar terrorist themed films (and television series) over the past few years, I may have become more tolerant (as horrifying as that now sounds to me), but I actually found Unlocked to be relatively engaging, and fast moving enough that I was willing to overlook its manifest shortcomings. Fans of the cast or even the director may well want to check this out, and for them technical merits are perfectly fine if not really inspiring.