Lockdown 2025 Review
Lockdown 2025 is a 2020 feature film written and directed by Michael Sean Hall.
A visual metaphor for the dangers of living a life unchanged, Lockdown 2025 is at its best when it stays small but tries in vain far too often to reach beyond its own limitations.
There is a certain amount of bravery that always comes with aiming high and that is one thing that this feature can certainly be applauded for. Many times, it tries to show off some larger scale events happening in the same ilk as an adjacent film series that is very similar in The Purge.
However, the flaw lies in the way the effects are showcased in the piece, while sometimes they are serviceable, for the most part the graphics just look out of place. The most notorious offender of this comes when the boyfriend attempts to flee to check on his family and a helicopter shoots at him. The helicopter just looks bad here, and this is ultimately a film thread that goes absolutely nowhere.
With that in mind the various story beats and overstuffed side elements are just plain all over the place in the piece. The characters seem to all change around with their attitudes in service of the plot more than believability and the ending especially seems to contain a handful of points where it could have and, in some cases, should have ended, but simply goes on.
As you watch the film, it really plays out like an early draft of a script, rather than something more well-defined. There are some interesting pieces that if presented better or more simply may have delivered more powerful moments.
It is a bit of a let down too because where the film was trying to go with its story was a sweet one and the emphasis on an African American father who obviously loves his family despite his own person flaws was an inspired one. Perhaps then the answer to the problems was to keep things contained and focused on the core catalyst of the world going mad, rather than trying to reach far beyond the current capabilities or budget allowed for.
Lockdown 2025 comes as a hard one to recommend for the overstuffed plot and less than stellar visual effects, but has some good glimpses of storytelling buried far beneath all of that. The cast was clearly trying their best here and a few ideas do land but it just might not be worth the time put in sitting down to it to get there.
Screener for this film was provided courtesy of Midnight Releasing.
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Cheers!
Daniel Hess
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