Running Out Of Ideas
The Complex: Lockdown is one of those typical Indie films that take a current big-news crisis and creates a movie inspired by that. A couple of months ago we had 5G Zombies and now, 2 months later, we’ve got a movie premise about a bio-weapon originating from South East Asia threatening life on our planet. It’s simple, very cliched and aside from a nice little twist near the end, offers nothing new that hasn’t been done before. The story wastes little time getting right to the heart of the drama with a brief prologue used to set the scene. We then skip forward 5 years where a woman named Amy leads a board meeting about K-Corp and the future nano-tech they’re working on. As she talks, we cut to a woman – later revealed to be one of their researchers called Clare Mahet – coughing up blood and caught with the nanobots inside her. What follows is a pressure cooker situation as Clare is taken down to the basement of The Complex while Amy and her goofball associate Rees – and ex-boyfriend – are forced to team up together. There, they make a tough choice between whether to save Clare’s life and extract the nanobots or kill her and be done with it. Of course, there’s a little more to the story than that and there’s a couple of surprises that aren’t that surprising thrown in to stop the story from stagnating. Unfortunately cheesy dialogue and plenty of cliched character work really hold this back. The acting flits between wooden and poor to unintentionally hilarious. Late on, a character is shot and instead of a big dramatic moment, a cheesy line of dialogue had me literally laughing out loud at the absurdity of it all. Another instance sees Amy and Rees exchanging corny lines about their life and it all feeds into the uninspiring screenplay. On top of that, you’ve got your romantic melodrama along with the obvious betrayal and secrets hidden from sight. All of this completely capitulates during the film’s climax as things become more contrived for the sake of a big stand-off at the end. If you’ve had enough of the current global situation and want some escapist entertainment, this is not going to provide that. Instead, The Complex: Lockdown a miserable reminder of what’s happening in the world, presenting a lethargically written and uninspiring script in the process. This is one indie film you should probably social distance from.
