This low-rent ‘Bourne’ clone has been sitting on the shelf for two years now, which explains why there’s a photo of Barack Obama still hanging above the CIA director’s desk. It might also explain why ‘Unlocked’ feels so choppy and uneven, like it needed a lot of knocking about in the editing room.
Noomi Rapace continues her leading lady losing streak as Alice Racine, a CIA agent working undercover in a Hackney community centre and keeping her eyes peeled for terrorists. When she’s contacted by a London police station and asked to interrogate a suspect, Alice is thrown into the black ops quagmire.
For the first half hour this is a serviceable thriller, studded with pleasing cameos – Michael Douglas, Toni Colette, John Malkovich – and anchored by Rapace’s muscular performance. But then Orlando Bloom shows up as a mysterious ex-military bruiser with a Cockney accent and ‘Unlocked’ goes sideways, fast. Not only is Bloom’s performance laughably misguided, his character is also completely surplus to requirements, stumbling randomly into the film and wandering off again long before the finale. It’s as though some studio exec thought ‘Unlocked’ needed a leading man and roughly shoehorned Bloom in – a choice that might play well on the posters, but makes for completely baffling viewing
