Now this is an interesting movie. Ivan Locke is your average bloke. A man with a good job as a construction manager (he’s surrounded by concrete all the time) with a wife and two sons. He drives a nice car, works hard, is respected by everyone he works with. When he leaves work for the night, just before the biggest job of his career is about to start, he gets a phone call that forces a divide into his life. He’s been putting off a decion for some time now, but this early phone call means he can’t ignore it anymore.
Locke looks at one person and one person only as he navigates three now razor sharp plates that make up his life. Locke is the only person you see in the entire movie, all of which is shot with him driving in his car. He talks to people (work, his wife and kids, the “mistake”) on the phone over Bluetooth as he drives away from his home. He’s eexhausted from work, he’s fighting back what sounds like a cold and the emotional pressure cooker he has put himself into crushes him from every side.
This shouldn’t work, but it does. Tom Hardy is such a good actor that he pulls Ivan Locke off so well. I never saw Tom, but Ivan the entire time. Watching him struggle to keep it together is really what the movie hinges on. It’s really more of a one man play shot as a movie. It sounds really boring but they found a way to shoot and edit it to keep you engaged. The conversations are varied and spread apart really well. The way the movie is shot, shows movement and progress. There’s a few exterior shots here and there, but mostly we’re right on top of the hood looking in. Sometimes in the passenger seat, sometimes in the back, I can only imagine the nightmare it was to figure out how to pace this movie right (run time is just under 90 minutes, I think Ivan’s trip is about 3 hours) but they pulled it off. It starts right at the very beginning too. Ivan gets into his car and we don’t know about the phone call yet. He comes to a stop light and puts the left blinker on. A cement truck is behind him and honks at him as he sits at it when it turns green. Suddenly, he signals right and turns right. Then he’s on the highway. Right there, without dialog, without you knowing it then and there, he’s made a massive life decision. He changed his mind, he’s going to “do the right thing.” At the end you realize where you came in on Ivan’s life.
I found Locke to be a really impressive bit of film making. From a really tight and original script with great dialog to all the right decisions that made it work so well. Inspiring stuff, I recommend it.
