WonderCon 2012: LOCKOUT Panel Recap; Maggie Grace Screens First Footage

Featuring producer Luc Besson (the writer behind Taken) and Maggie Grace (the daughter who was Taken), the high-octane outer space thriller Lockout made an appearance at WonderCon 2012 today. This time, the man with a particular set of skills is no longer Liam Neeson, but Guy Pearce (Memento), playing Snow, a man wrongly accused of conspiracy to commit espionage. His one chance at a pardon comes when he is tasked with rescuing the president’s daughter from a maximum security outer space prison facility when the inmates take control. Lockout also stars Peter Stormare (Constantine) and is the feature directorial debut of James Mather and Stephen St. Leger. The film opens April 13th. Hit the jump to check out our WonderCon panel recap.

The Lockout panel started off with the trailer that was previously released by Open Road and Film District. It doesn’t highlight Snow’s (Pearce) charisma and sarcasm as much as other trailers, which I find to be a strong selling point to the movie. The addition of Besson lends some gravity (pardon the pun) to the project and his influence is readily apparent. The panel also screened five minutes of footage from Lockout which focused on Snow’s entry into the facility, a nice anti-gravity fight between Snow and a random prisoner and his daring rescue of Emilie Warnock (Grace). It also touched on a bit of the madness and personality of the prisoners involved as they force a prison engineer to open a locked door standing between them and the president’s daughter. While Pearce’s wise-cracks were welcome, some of the plotting was simply inane, as in [SPOILER] Emilie’s bodyguard blowing his own brains out to preserve the remaining oxygen in the room or Snow jabbing a “self-directing” needle into Emilie’s eye in order to jump-start her brain functions.

Grace was present for an intimate Q&A after screening the footage. I’ve posted her comments below:

Flying into town, Grace hadn’t quite cleaned all of the blood off the back of her neck from the shoot, having just wrapped on Taken 2. She quipped about the prudence of Homeland Security and their ability to spot it.Grace commented on the sequence in Lockout where she has to cut her hair, dye it (with “horrible things from the men’s bathroom and grease) and appear to be a young male prisoner in an attempt to escape.Grace said that Lockout “doesn’t take itself too seriously,” calling it a fun and funny action movie.For fans of Maggie Grace, you might be interested to know that she is a closet Jane Austen fan who even had period costumes growing up.On seeing the rough cut of Lockout, her mom and little sister were a bit shocked at the fellatio joke between her and Pearce as seen in the trailer and footage.

Overall, the film does look fun and funny with a little bit of crazy thrown it. It seemed like a combination of a lot of Escape from New York, with some The Fifth Element and Die Hard for good measure. If any or all of those films appeal to you, do yourself a favor and check out Lockout on April 13th.

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Here’s the synopsis for Lockout:

Starring Guy Pearce and Maggie Grace and set in the near future, LOCKOUT follows a falsely convicted ex- government agent (Pearce), whose one chance at obtaining freedom lies in the dangerous mission of rescuing the President’s daughter (Grace) from rioting convicts at an outer space maximum security prison.

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