DVD reviews: Lockout | Ecstasy

By ALISTAIR HARKNESS
Published on 20/08/2012 00:00

WHEN it comes to supplying modestly budgeted, brain-off genre thrills, Luc Besson has carved out quite a niche for himself, writing and producing movies like the Transporter series and, more recently, the nascent Taken franchise (part two of which will be in cinemas in a couple of months).

Lockout

Entertainment, £19.99

Indeed, having long since abandoned directing quality cinema himself, Besson has become so adept at creating a factory line of formulaic-but-fun action movies via his Europacorp production house, we surely can’t be too far away from seeing a “mentioned once in passing” story credit at the top of one of his films. Lockout is certainly edging in that direction. “Based,” state the credits, “on an original idea” by Besson, it takes the basic plot of Escape from New York and relocates it to space where a maximum security penal colony has been overtaken by its inmates while being visited by the president’s daughter (Taken’s Maggie Grace). Enter Guy Pearce’s disgraced government agent, Snow. Given a choice to rescue the First Daughter or rot in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, Snow takes the former option and proceeds to crack wise while raising merry hell. It’s Pearce, of course, who makes this work, a sure sign of the value a slumming-it movie star can bring to material well below his stature. Having said that, as a pair of psycho Scottish siblings leading the prison revolt, Brit actors Vincent Regan and Joseph Gilgun acquit themselves well enough as the film’s amusingly over-the-top villains.

Ecstasy

Kaleidoscope, £17.99

Lockout’s unexpected Scottish connection is certainly more entertaining than Irvine Welsh’s Ecstasy, a belated and dated attempt to bring one of the stories contained within the Trainspotting author’s slapdash 1996 ‘Chemical Romance’ triptych to the big screen. It revolves around an ageing Leith clubber (Adam Sinclair) who begins to suspect there may be more to life than dealing and popping party pills after falling for a frustrated Canadian office drone (the film was funded and largely shot in Canada). The script’s eulogistic appraisal of ecstasy as a love drug all sounds drearily quaint, particularly since the absence of specific period detail ensures it has nothing of interest to say about either the late 1980s/early 1990s rave scene or today’s youth culture.

• To order these DVDs, call The Scotsman on 01634 832789