LOCKE

(Steven Knight, 2013)

Locke is based around such a simple premise that the execution has to be more or less perfect or else it fails utterly.
Tom Hardy is Ivan Locke, a foreman on a massive Birmingham building project who is driving down the M6 to London at night in order to be with a woman (Olivia Coleman) who is about to have his baby. While he drives he makes and takes a series of Bluetooth phone calls. It emerges that the baby is the product of a one-night stand and Locke barely knows the woman. He is leaving his project the night before a massive and massively important concrete pour, possibly jeopardising a $100 Million operation by leaving it in the hands of Donal (Andrew Scott), and virtually guaranteeing his own dismissal.
His wife and two sons are waiting for him to come home and watch football with them, but events force his hand, and by the time he reaches London, he hopes to have settled everything, both professional and personal.
Hardy is the only actor we see, sat behind the wheel of his BMW for most of this film, the others just a series of evocative voices on the other end of the line. He is strapped in, which helps, somehow, forcing us and Knight to focus upon his face and head, and guaranteeing that every tic and slightest expression has a seismic impact. Hardy is sensational here, portraying a good, principled man as he rapidly watches his life fall apart, all because of one mistake. We watch as his Locke goes from efficiency to despair, and Hardy sells it all. This is an intimate, precise study of this man, and much of the credit for that should go to the leading man.
Knight plays his part too, ensuring that Locke remains surprisingly, impressively cinematic throughout. The constant funnel of light that is the motorway is frequently beautiful, and Knight shoots Hardy from a variety of angles, colour and shadow passing across his face in lovely washes.
And it all works; works so well that what is essentially a small-scale family drama has accrued the level of tension and suspense more commonly experienced with a thriller. A giant step forward for Knight from Hummingbird, and further evidence that Hardy is currently one of our greatest screen actors.

HUMMINGBIRD

aka REDEMPTION

(Steven Knight, 2013)

Hummingbird is about as close as Jason Statham gets these days to working in non-genre cinema. That is to say it's still a genre film, it just has fewer action sequences than the majority of his films do. In their place there is much more dramatic content which requires a lot more from him as an actor, and he delivers fairly well, giving a sensitive, sustained and committed reading of a particular shade to his usual grim and ultra-violent hero.
He plays Joey, an ex Special forces soldier who has escaped from a Military Asylum after an incident in Afghanistan and is living rough in the streets of Central London. A violent encounter leads him to take shelter in the vacant Covent Garden apartment of a photographer, and while recovering there, Joey begins to put his life back together. He finds work as an enforcer for the Chinese mob, using his earnings to help the mission for the homeless run by Sister Cristina (Agata Buzek), while searching for the killer of his friend Isabel. Of course, he and Cristina develop feelings for one another, and Joey's past is never very far away.
While it initially seems like it might be a boiler plate Statham revenge actioner, Hummingbird eventually emerges as a love story between two damaged people. Joey and Cristina's story is told against the complicated tapestry writer-director Knight paints of modern London, here luminously shot by old master Chris Menges as a neon-slicked nocturnal city. This tale takes in protection rackets, prostitution, the restaurant trade, the art world and the police, and Statham broods his way through all of it, only occasionally allowed to explode into violence. He and Buzek have some chemistry, and their relationship is oddly touching despite the awkward set-up of some entirely cliched material.
But Statham's very presence seems to tug the film in another direction; for all it's evenly paced seriousness and the many talky scenes about emotions and plot, it almost feels as if it wants to be an action film, and Knight correspondingly stages the few brutal fight scenes with vivid panache.
Still, it's an interesting change of pace for the star, and it reveals a few more emotional registers within his range, even while it is much more entertaining when he is hurting people.