"The monosyllabic surname of a title and one-sheet featuring Tom Hardy behind the wheel of a BMW suggest an action thriller— I entered the theater ready to learn how Locke, Ivan Locke takes his martini— but this is actually a film devoid of espionage, terrorism, and even good guys and bad guys. The crisis at the center of Locke, which stars only Hardy and remains inside of the BMW for all but the first minute of its running time, is far more complex than that of a globetrotting spy movie in that the blame rests entirely on its protagonist’s shoulders. This isn’t a film about plot; it’s a film about self-inflicted anguish.
"Locke joins last year’s A Hijacking as a superlative examination of how 21st Century men attempt to exercise control over situations in which they are compromised. Who would have guessed that Hardy’s Bluetooth-beamed confession of the impending birth of an extramarital child on the eve of a career-making industrial cement pour could make for the tensest thriller of 2014? But that’s what we have here, albeit not a thriller in the conventional sense, but rather one that mines Hardy’s subtle transformations in affect to ride the viewer’s nerves as it interrogates contemporary masculinity. Writer/director Steven Knight lets Hardy take the reigns, but the ideas bubbling underneath the surface are just as integral as the lead performance." ~ Danny Baldwin
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