LOCKED DOWN

(Doug Liman, 2021, UK)

The first big movie of this unusual cinematic year, released directly to streaming (where else?), is ostensibly a pandemic-set heist flick, about a quarantined-together yet emotionally-separated couple (Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor) who team up to steal a £3 million diamond from famed London department store Harrods. Really, though, the film is just another in the emerging sub-genre of COVID-inflected dramedies, with the diamond heist narrative almost added as an afterthought when screenwriter Steven Knight realized he needed to have an actual plot to justify his wordy script. With its heavy reliance on video calls and news broadcasts to establish its contemporary credentials, not to mention its handheld camerawork and writerly dialogue, the film really resembles most strongly one of the many online reunion specials we’ve seen over the last year, with the cast essentially filming themselves in their own million dollar homes (Hathaway and Ejiofor’s characters share an affluent home on Portland Road in West London, likely owned by someone in the cast or crew). In that sense it further stretches and challenges the definition of what cinema really is in the streaming age.