Unlocked movie review & film summary (2017)

Rapace plays Alice Racine, a brilliant CIA operative who hasn’t worked in the field since she was unable to prevent a terrorist attack in Paris in 2012. Currently in London as an undercover agent in the guise of a social worker, Alice refuses entreaties from her former mentor (Michael Douglas) to return to the fold, but soon finds herself pulled back in when the agency asks for her help with an important case involving a potential attack on London by an ISIS cell. A courier with key information has been captured en route to deliver a key message and she is asked to get it out of him. Getting the information is easy enough but Alice soon begins to sense that the situation is not quite as it seems. Indeed, her intuitions are correct, and she manages to escape in the nick of time along with the coveted information.

On the run and unsure of who she can trust anymore, Alice runs into plenty of people along the way to arouse her suspicions. Besides the mentor, there is the local CIA bureau chief (John Malkovich), who professes to believe her story but nevertheless deems her behavior to be highly suspicious at best. There is her main MI5 contact (Toni Collette), who may or may not know more than she is letting on. Most bizarrely, there is a cat burglar (Orlando Bloom) that she meets when she catches him robbing a safe house where she is intending to hide out and who is revealed to possess the kind of advanced skill set not often seen in guys who boost TVs for a living. About the only person that she can actually put her trust in is Amjad (Tosin Cole), a local who has been giving her information on suspicious neighbors and who seems to have what it takes to make it as an agent himself.

What could have made for a reasonably entertaining potboiler turns out to be a surprisingly boring experience thanks to the profoundly uninteresting screenplay by Peter O’Brien, the kind of by-the-numbers enterprise that is constantly trying to pull the rug out from under the feet of viewers but never seems to realize that they have already pretty much sussed out all the allegedly surprising twists and turns. Director Michael Apted has shown his talents in the past in films ranging from straightforward entertainments like “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and “Gorky Park” to the landmark “Up” documentary series but he mostly fails to give the film the kind of stylistic spark that would have helped it to transcend the mundane material. The only time it really comes alive is during the genuinely impressive set piece involving her escaping the suspicious interrogation, a neat sequence that puts the more elaborate action scenes on display to shame.