Tom Hardy channels Richard Burton’s mellifluous Welsh-ness as the title character in Locke. He’s supposed to be a chief-concrete-pourer (yes, that’s a thing) on a massive building site in Birmingham (although that sing-song accent though makes him sound like a pompous professor of Dylan Hardy poetry – why?) and the movie charts his otherwise-inexplicable desertion of his job and his loving family in a series of increasingly tortuous phone calls during a night time dash down the motorway to London.
Locke is therefore a pretty impressive piece of experimental cinema, with only Hardy himself ever appearing on screen and virtually the entire production focusing on him, to camera. The voice actors do sterling work to build character and emotion through crackly telephone lines, and Tom Hardy (accent or no) is excellent. Locke filmed on the back of a flat-bed truck and there’s interesting stuff on how it was achieved here. But: masterful cinema, yes. Enjoyable cinema, no not really.