Pearce serves up punches, punchlines

April 14, 2012 at 12:00a.m.

McClatchy Newspapers

Guy Pearce goes into low-Earth orbit to get his cool back in “Lockout,” a silly sci-fi B-picture made fun by his star turn.

It’s “Escape from New York” in space, with Pearce channeling Kurt Russell’s brawny bravado as Snow, a disgraced CIA agent sent to rescue the president’s daughter from convicts on the M.S. One space prison.

Pearce is as frosty as a meat locker, from the film’s first moments — a brutal interrogation in which Snow answers every body blow with a one-liner.

“I don’t like hurting people,” his interrogator (Peter Stormare) purrs, before his assistant delivers another punch.

Snow: “Is that why you’re letting him do it?”

But there’s a way out of this. Go fetch the president’s do-gooder daughter (Maggie Grace, an amusing skinny-girl foil for Pearce), whose prison investigation visit coincided with a prison riot on Maximum Security One. Five hundred murderers and rapists, led by a couple of Scots (Vincent Regan and Joseph Gilgun), are out of “stasis” (deep freeze) and holding her as their insurance. Snow is shot into space and talked-through a space walk and break-in that will lead him to the girl.

She runs out of oxygen, he has to revive her.

“I was dead?”

“Yeah. So far, I think I prefer you that way.”

The bad guys are generic psychopaths, the situations far-fetched and the science silly. The effects, especially those on Earth, are plainly animated and rough around the edges. The action onboard the station has Snow defying the laws of physics at every turn.

Action producer Luc Besson, who came up with the story and contracted others to direct it, doesn’t know much about space or physics or the U.S. Constitution in the year 2079. The producer of the “Transporter” movies and “Taken” is all about the action — which, truth be told, is only passable here.

No car chases or parkour races (“District B-13”) make Monsieur Luc’s movies dull.

But Pearce took the job and showed up for work with gum in his mouth and a script full of one-liners that fly by, even in zero G.

“Shhhhhhh.”

“What, did you hear something?”

“Noooo. I’m just enjoying the silence.”