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Watching a film set during a global pandemic while actually going through a global pandemic can have a significant negative impact on the viewer, depending on how the latter feels about the real-life problem. Honestly, my expectations were pretty low, but Locked Down is one of the most pleasant surprises I've had the luck of coming across in the last few months.

Steven Knight's screenplay is humorously clever, packed with jokes about humanity's silliest behaviors during a lockdown. From the ridiculously amount of toilet paper rolls to the arguing about the most irrelevant, unimportant things at home, Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor deeply elevate a simple yet entertaining narrative with two incredibly amusing performances. Their chemistry is on-point, and their characters are equally funny.

Doug Liman crafted a two-hour enjoyable, inoffensive, mostly realistic story of a couple in need of finding what made them fall in love... at least until the beginning of the utterly absurd third act. Yes, the whole movie follows a generic formula filled with cliches, but the last half an hour switches to a ridiculous heist mission that doesn't really connect with the characters or the story until that point (besides the dozens of logical issues it raises).

Overall, I recommend it to anyone who has a couple of extra hours to watch something light on TV, but if you genuinely want to escape or forget about the current global situation, then maybe it's better to save this one for another time.

Rating: B-

This incoming wave of _“COVID cinema”_ is going to be rough. After the _“Trump cinema”_, now this – Hollywood is truly brain dead, not a single original thought. :weary:

I’ve tried to finish this two times and I just can’t do it. It’s as boring as being in actual lockdown. I knew it would be bad but didn’t expect it to be _that_ bad. _Locked Down_ felt like it has no idea what it wants to be, so it seems like 5 different movies in one, none of which are good:

1. **As a comedy** - it’s not very funny. Boring COVID-19 related “jokes”. There is the running gag that no one in Britain knows who Edgar Allan Poe is. You can tell the writers thought this was the funniest thing in the world, but for me it isn’t.

2. **As a relationship drama** - it’s unbearably overdramatic. The two main character don’t exist in real life and if they did they’d never be dating for 10 years! There are so many long and pointless monologues where Linda and Paxton are just going around in circles and trying sound intelligent or witty, but basically they don't say anything important. For example, _“I wanted wild and you were wild. Then I didn’t want wild anymore and you stopped being wild”_ - that doesn’t even make any sense if you think about it. :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

3. **As a heist movie** - it’s an absolute and total joke. How are you calling this a heist movie when the 'heist' is barely a third of the runtime? :neutral_face:

4. **As escapism** - how am I supposed to feel sympathy for the rich CEO lady who got to keep her job she hates? She feels very badly about it, so we should relate to her, I guess?

5. **As a depiction of the times** - Get this, for a movie that takes place during COVID ... nobody ever wears a mask. :mask: Is that what it was like in London at the beginning of lockdown? And if this was the first 2 weeks of quarantine then why was Zoom calls already in the picture? The way each character verbosely rambles on about how _two_ (!!!) weeks in quarantine have fundamentally changed themselves was so pretentious.