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"FacebookPinterest\n\nThe new movie Locke is 85 minutes long, and Tom Hardy\u2014as title character Ivan Locke, a building contractor playing hooky on the eve of the biggest job of his life\u2014spends nearly all of them alone in a car. Sometimes he just drives. But most of the time, he's yakking on the phone\u2014to his wife, his kids, his co-workers and his bosses\u2014with occasional breaks to berate the dead father he imagines sitting in his Beamer's back seat. Aside from everybody's voices\u2014well, not Dad's\u2014in his ear, there's basically nobody else on the screen. Which means that calling this an acting showcase is like calling Locke's BMW a go-cart.\n\nThe protagonist is a pained, unhappy man who's gloomily determined to do the right thing, even at the cost of putting his marriage at risk and screwing up his professional reputation. We gradually learn that some months back, he impregnated a lonely woman during an out-of-town one-night stand. Now she's due to give birth in London\u2014her panicky calls to him are the neediest ones on the soundtrack\u2014and she's got no relatives or friends she can count on for support. So Locke is going to slay his own absentee father's selfish ghost by proving how upright he can be.\n\nTrue, most women would probably swap a firm guarantee of child support for our hero's absence from the delivery room. But that would make a one-phone-call movie, wouldn't it? It's easy to get exasperated at how pleased writer-director Steven Knight is with his own ingenuity, given how neatly the tag-team conversations touch on all the bases of Locke's life\u2014both professional (we can tell he's really good at what he does) and personal (he's traumatized but resolute). If it weren't for the 21st-century technology, you could easily mistake Locke for a Twilight Zone idea that Rod Serling finally decided didn't have enough surprises to be worth shooting.\n\nBut Hardy is so good that the movie's premise only registers as the stunt it is in hindsight. \u00A0This actor's been doing terrific work in an eclectic bunch of movies for some time now, from his deft turn as Eames the \"identify forger\" in Christopher Nolan's Inception to adding a welcome touch of lowlife swagger to the gray world of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Playing Bane in The Dark Knight Rises might have been Hardy's breakthrough to stardom if not for Nolan's perversity in hiring one of the most compelling faces and voices in movies\u2014if you can rarely take your eyes off him when he's on-screen, you seldom want to take your ears off him either\u2014and then turning them both unrecognizable.\n\nIn Locke, funnily enough, those assets are almost equally hidden, in one case behind the kind of beard a wary man grows for emotional camouflage\u2014definitely not self-expression\u2014and in the other by a Welsh accent a lesser actor would strangle on. Yet Hardy is riveting, and that's not because he's showing off; it's because he's refusing to. In these circumstances, it takes a lot of confidence not to over-emote: Sean Penn would be so terrified of losing our interest that he'd have the steering wheel gnawed off before he was halfway to London. Hardy holds our attention by not worrying about it. He knows that Locke is bent on holding his unruly, unwelcome emotions in check, not venting them.\n\nPart of what keeps his performance so credible is the way he passes up opportunities for mawkishness. Even when his son\u2014who doesn't know why Mum's so upset\u2014wants to burble on about the soccer game his dad is missing, Hardy doesn't sentimentalize Locke's mid feelings. He's not uncaring, much less callous, but he's also got a hell of a lot of other fish to fry that Junior isn't helping with. \u00A0One of the heftiest is the huge job he's delegating to a subordinate in the crunch\u2014pouring the cement base for a skyscraper\u2014and Hardy is wonderful at keeping us so intent on the practical details of the process involved that Knight's symbolic overkill (laying the foundation for a building, get it?) doesn't land with the thud you'd expect.\n\nIf it weren't for Hardy, the movie wouldn't amount to much more than a clever way for Knight to advertise himself. (It's got that \"See what I can do?\" vibe that also characterized Nolan's own Memento\u2014and that worked out awfully well for Nolan, obviously.) Instead, Locke is a case study in what a difference an actor can make. Since he's only human, even Hardy can't save those wince-worthy soliloquies to spectral, dead old Dad in the rear-view mirror, which should have had cement poured over them from the get-go. Yet the fact that he even comes close makes you think that the guy could probably sell shoe polish to antelopes if he felt like it."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/tom-hardy-movie-locke-review>