There is no good reason for me to always equate Tom Hardy with Jason Statham. They’re both British leading men who’ve appeared in Guy Ritchie films, but Hardy actually has a range of acting abilities, while Statham is more often than not the guy playing “the Jason Statham” role.
Now I have even more reason to be confused. Deadline reports that Tom Hardy will take the lead role in the thriller Locke, and it definitely sounds like a Jason Statham movie. Not helping things is that Locke’s writer and director, Steven Knight, has his directorial debut coming out later this year. It’s called Hummingbird, and it stars Jason Statham.
Locke’s seat-of-your-pants-grabbing plot focuses on Ivan Locke (Hardy) and his “tension-fuelled ninety-minute race against time” in which a phone call, one that comes a day before he is to achieve the pinnacle moment of his career, will force him to make a decision that puts his perfect marriage and dream job into jeopardy. The three films this immediately brings to mind are Nick of Time, The Box, and 88 Minutes, give or take two minutes. None of these films are necessarily what one might call “a positive association.” But then there's also Statham's own Crank, about another guy racing against time, and that one at least has its own cult built up around it.
But there’s more than enough reason to be excited about this project. It’s an original concept, first of all, and Knight was the screenwriter for both Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises, and wrote the upcoming BBC gangster series Peaky Blinders, starring Cillian Murphy and Sam Neill. So the guy definitely knows how to make crime exciting, even when a naked Viggo Mortensen has nothing to do with it. Locke will begin its London production later this month, so expect us to soon start posting pictures of Tom Hardy looking stressed out.
