Set in the English countryside, “Locked In” stars Famke Janssen (“X-Men,” “The Faculty”) as Katherine, Rose Williams (“Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” “That Dirty Black Bag”) as Lina, Finn Cole (“Peaky Blinders,” “F9: The Fast Saga”) as Jamie, Alex Hassell (“The Tragedy of Macbeth,” “Violent Night”) as Dr. Robert Lawrence, and Anna Friel (“Marcella,” “Pushing Daisies”) as Nicky Mackenzie, and all deliver some pretty solid performances. If you’re a fan of the era of formulaic but respectable crime thrillers from the late ’90s and throughout the ’00s, this will be right up your alley. Honestly, it shares a similar flavor to a made-for-TV crime thriller you’d catch on Lifetime or Oxygen on a Sunday afternoon, which is sometimes all anyone wants to kill an hour and 40 minutes with.
I hate to call this a “background” film, but it is the type of movie you put on when you don’t really want to pay attention, but sitting in silence with your own thoughts is just too much to handle. Enter: watching a film like “Locked In.” Fortunately, the big reveal of who attacked Katherine is pretty easy to figure out, so fans who actually paid attention will feel rewarded and validated almost immediately. I don’t have any theories as to why this film is performing so well when there are other releases of better quality and with more name value than this flick, but I’m not mad about it. As far as I’m concerned, anything that proves the algorithm is an imperfect system that can’t actually predict what will be a success gets a gold star in my book.
Oh, and there’s no such thing as too much Famke Janssen.