Directed by James Mather and Stephen St Leger. Starring Guy Pearce, Maggie Grace, Vincent Regan, Joseph Gilgun, Lennie James, Peter Stormare 15A cert, general release, 94 min

STEPHEN ST LEGER and James Mather, two talented Irish directors, come close to pulling off a successful leap to the big time with this prison movie set in near space.

The John Carpenter references are all in position. Guy Pearce makes with the quips in energetic fashion. It rattles along at an appropriately frantic pace. It’s just a shame that so much cheese has been allowed into the recipe. Produced by the irrepressible – however hard we try to repress him – Luc Besson, Lockout casts Pearce as an ex-CIA agent who has been wrongly accused of murder. It is the year 2079, and criminals are now sent to an orbiting space prison and dropped into suspended animation for the duration of their sentence.

Before Guy is dispatched, a group of maniacs, detained in the jail, break their shackles and take the president’s daughter (Maggie Grace) captive. She is visiting on a humanitarian mission and the villains don’t yet know the value of their hostage.

If you’ve seen Carpenter’s Escape from New York you’ll know what happens next. Offered the promise of information that might secure his release, Guy is sent to the prison with orders to bring the first daughter home.

The film reveals its origins as a mid-budget Euro production in an opening sequence utilising CGI that would barely pass muster on a 1980s video game. Blocky motor vehicles crash clumsily through crudely realised streetscapes.

The picture settles down somewhat when Guy reaches the space station. Joseph Gilgun is fabulously horrid as a Scottish maniac with a look modelled on Travis Bickle during his most troubled period. The action, as they say, never lets up.

Unfortunately, the supposedly screwball dialogue between Grace and Pearce – predictably at each other’s throats – sounds consistently off-pitch throughout. Rather than zipping off the tongue, the banter crashes weightily about the bulkheads with all the grace of an injured ostrich. The bookended plot is far more complex than necessary, and there is little style to the spaceship design.

That said, there’s enough potential in Lockout to suggest that Mather and St Leger might yet deliver. Keep your eyes peeled.