118 min | R | January 14, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A divorcing couple rides out the first lockdown in the same house, one firing employees over video calls and the other reciting poetry to no one. Then they decide to rob Harrods. The heist is the excuse. The marriage is the crime scene.
London sits empty under the first wave of pandemic lockdown. Linda and Paxton are a couple at the end of their marriage, trapped in the same house with nowhere to go. She runs a fashion company and fires people over video calls. He drives a delivery truck and carries a criminal record that keeps him stuck in place. The two of them stumble into a plan to steal a diamond from Harrods while the city is shut down. The film wants to be a heist caper and a relationship autopsy at the same time, and it is really about two people talking themselves through the rubble of a life they no longer share.
Anne Hathaway plays Linda as a woman performing competence while she comes apart underneath it. She delivers layoffs through a laptop screen and rehearses her own undoing alone in an empty office. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Paxton with a wounded dignity that the script keeps undercutting. He recites Romantic poetry from the seat of his motorcycle and argues with himself in the dark. The supporting cast arrives almost entirely through video windows. Ben Kingsley, Ben Stiller, Mindy Kaling, and Lucy Boynton appear as faces on screens, each handed a scene or two and little room to register.
Doug Liman directs with the restless instincts he carried into his action films, and those instincts fight the material here. The movie is built from long two-handed conversations, and Liman keeps cutting and circling as if motion can substitute for tension. Steven Knight writes the kind of dense, monologue-heavy dialogue that worked when he confined a single man to a car in Locke. Spread across rooms and screens, the talk loses its grip and starts to repeat itself. The heist does not arrive until the final stretch, and it carries almost no danger. The video-call framing turns half the cast into rectangles, a choice that captures the moment and flattens the drama at once.
The two halves of Locked Down never fuse. The relationship drama is the stronger film, and it sits buried under speeches that explain feelings the actors already convey. The heist is a device to put two people in the same room, and it knows it. Hathaway and Ejiofor commit fully and earn moments the writing does not deserve. The pandemic backdrop felt urgent at the moment of release and now reads as a time capsule. What remains is a curiosity, made fast under strange conditions, that mistakes a premise for a story.