Locke

Locke is one of those films that could very easily be adapted to the stage, it is set in one location, features one actor on screen, (albeit talking to several high profile actors via phone, including Olivia Colman and Tom Holland) and is a character study which recalls the quote from Henry David Thoreau that "Most men live lives of quiet desperation".


Tom Hardy plays a convincingly average every man who's life is unraveling before his eyes as he desperately tries to hold it together.

He is losing his marriage, his job and is expecting a child from a love affair and to top it off is reliving the trauma of having been abandoned by his father as a boy, but he is a problem solver and is trying to fix any aspect of his life that he still has control over, and that's the film.

Now, its a good character study, its well acted, its engrossing and it has a statement to make about stoicism and how men experience turmoil. But, as a film I have one criticism, for me it needed to go further than it did, perhaps the point would be lost, but for me at some point I believed that each phone call would slowly unravel his sanity and reveal something about him that we the viewer didn't know; so when this didn't happen i was a bit disappointed.

That said I think its a well put together movie that hinges on Hardy's performance, and like always he delivers.