Reason Writers at the Movies: Peter Suderman Reviews Lockout
Senior Editor Peter Suderman reviews the new sci-fi prison escape movie Lockout in The Washington Times:
"Lockout" belongs to a number of familiar cinematic subgenres: It's part prison-escape flick, part sci-fi spectacular, part glib '80s-throwback action blockbuster. At times, it even threatens to become a slam-bang modern martial arts movie.
But the genre it belongs to most is the good bad movie. Indeed, as bad movies go, "Lockout" is one of the better examples Hollywood has released in years.
The good bad movie is not to be confused with the so-bad-it's-good movie that viewers of"Mystery Science Theater 3000" know so well. In those cases, a movie's outrageous and usually unintended deficiencies become so outsized as to be entertaining unto themselves.
Instead, the good bad movie is a movie that, by most common measures—script, story, special effects, character development—fails to meet a basic minimum threshold for acceptability, yet is somehow genuinely engaging and entertaining anyway.