The Locksmith review – Ryan Philippe holds the key to straight-ahead noir thriller

The plot manoeuvres in this léger noir are so boilerplate and predictable that viewers are likely to find themselves expecting much bigger twists than are actually delivered. Surely that nice guy will turn out to be a double-crosser, you assume? Or you might imagine one of the vampy women will turn out to be a triple-crossing femme fatale. But no, it’s all pretty much on the level, which makes the snippets of classic Hollywood crime thrillers such as Touch of Evil, just glimpsed on a TV set, feel seriously undermining, gesturing as they do towards much more sophisticated works of cinema than we have here.

Ryan Phillippe stars as Miller, the titular locksmith, who in the opening scene has been forced into doing a heist that goes very wrong and ends up sending him to prison for 10 years. When he gets out, his now-ex-wife Beth (Kate Bosworth) is a rising police officer and his daughter Lindsay (Madeleine Guilbot) barely knows him. At least old friend Frank (Ving Rhames) offers him a job, but it’s only a matter of time before the past comes round again with Miller under pressure to atone for past crimes by committing entirely new ones. Gabriela Quezada is on hand as a battered sex worker, the surviving sister of a man whom Miller got killed years back. There are good cops and dirty cops, and shootouts at motels that puncture the eerie quiet of what looks like a barely populated desert town.

It seems that this is the first time in the director’s chair for Nicolas Harvard, whose CV mostly consists of gigs as a first assistant director. Judging by this, he’s learned how to keep actors hitting their marks but not how to enable them to emote with more than perfunctory effort. None of the craft contributions stand out either, from the unremarkable cinematography to the mediocre score, but nothing is outright offensively bad. It’s not great, but it’s the sort thing you could easily waste some time watching on a plane, or even on your phone during a long bus journey.

• The Locksmith is released on 24 April on digital platforms.