So when the photos of Hasbro's entirely new take on the nonpartisan bounty hunter surfaced, I was impressed but, initially, not that interested... We all know how these things go, with my collecting habits, and I ended up ordering him almost as soon as he became available. How many Lockdowns does one collector need?
Vehicle Mode:
The only complaints I had about the AoE Lockdown toy were the weird plastic colour of the car shell and the open side windows, both of which have been rectified here. All the windows are present, and molded in a smoky grey translucent plastic that successfully conceals most of the internal workings of the toy, while the car shell is molded in a dark gunmetal/charcoal plastic, but also possibly painted over with a shimmery, metallic-looking paint, as there's no visible difference between the gunmetal colour on the opaque parts and the translucent window parts. One interesting flaw in the paintwork is on the back of the car, where part of the frame for the slatted rear windows - the bit where AoE Lockdown's weapon tabbed in to its vehicle mode - is sculpted more accurately to the real vehicle, but has been left unpainted. In some instances on the real car, this section can be in a different colour than the rest of the car's body, but it never seems to be part of the window itself.
There's not much other paintwork - the Lamborghini badge is picked out in gold and the rear indicator lights are painted red, but just about everything else that might normally be painted on a car - headlights, hubcaps, exhaust pipes - have no unique applications. Curiously, this doesn't leave vehicle mode looking boring (unlike Alien Attack's Firage) simply because the bodywork and paint/plastic colour are so eyecatching. Being a licensed model Aventador, it looks fantastic... but a few additional paint applications would have made it one of the best Studio Series vehicles.
Still, in terms of sculpted detail, this seems to be a very accurate Aventador, and the designers did a pretty good job of using the car's seams as transformation seams in some places. Not so much on the back of the vehicle, where the two seams are very separate but, strangely, only a millimetre or so apart, but I've certainly seen more egregious seams on other movie toys.
Unlike the AoE version of the figure, Studio Series Lockdown comes packaged with two melée weapons - his hook and dagger. In vehicle mode, all you can do with either is plug them in to slots on the car doors. Melée weapons on vehicle modes always look a bit daft and, considering the amount of space available on the underside, it's disappointing that they sculpted slots in the otherwise virtually flawless vehicle to accommodate weapons that aren't even effective in this mode. The gun accessory that came with the AoE figure doesn't attach to this toy in any way, but even that gun would look wrong on this vehicle mode.
Robot Mode:
While the original Lockdown ended up with pretty bizarre proportions - the lower portion of his torso seemed truncated, and his legs were too short for the upper body - this one looks pretty optimal... if a little chunky at the biceps. On the original, it seemed as though too much attention had been paid to the transformation of the chest - ensuring the vehicle's headlights ended up in approximately the right place - that everything else somehow ended up sacrificed. This time, they've taken the somewhat more logical route of faking most of the robot mode detail which, while a little disappointing, is much the same as Peru Kill's approach, and allows for much finer detailing of all the robot parts.
And what a lot of finer detailing there is. Freed from the constraints of using vehicle mode parts in any meaningful way, the robot features quite stunning depth of detail on every surface. The chest is particularly intricate and, thanks to a pop-out central section, isn't as flat as it first appears. It features lots of overlapping details and, overall, is probably truer to the CGI than Peru Kill. The feet, legs, groin and forearms are likewise both more accurately and more deeply detailed, and they've done a remarkably good job of reproducing Lockdown's spare ammo clips on his shoulders and upper arms, given the space they had to work with. They've even worked it so that his wheels end up on the backs of his upper arms, just like the CGI. Of course, this isn't necessarily a good thing: it struck me that many of the characters introduced in Age of Extinction were designed with less emphasis on looking like believable 'robots in disguise', and Lockdown - while certainly more convincing as a shape-shifting robot than the likes of Megatron in the either of the first two movies - was a super-intricate robot, almost as tall as Optimus Prime, who somehow became a super-smooth and comparatively small Lamborghini Aventador... I guess Michael Bay eventually just accepted mass-shifting, to a degree.
Sadly, with all this scuplted detail, much of the paint budget appears to have gone on coating a good portion of robot mode with the same sparkly charcoal paint as vehicle mode. Some parts - the groin, hips, forearms and feet - are clearly unpainted, but match fairly well anyway. He has only a handful of spot applications in various metallic colours, dotted about the chest and on the spring/piston things in his thighs. It looks reasonable, but a greater variety of small colour applications can be seen on a detailed image of the CGI. Of the few spot applications there are, several on mine are a little messy - the blue paint intended to represent his partially-concealed headlight on the left side of his chest is completely misaligned, for example. That said, given that this is just a Deluxe class toy, it's not unexpected that some minor applications are missing, and one cannot expect perfectly accurate paintwork on mass-produced toys these days. Lockdown probably looks better for his simplicity... it's not as if any of the detail is lost, thanks to the perfectly-pitched tone of the plastic.
One interesting point about the paint job is that there's not a single Decepticon insignia on the toy. The AoE version had a large insignia on the left side door and a really dinky one on the chest, so it's nice the see Hasbro actually paid attention to their own movie property this time round and left him without any faction insignia.
As mentioned, this version of Lockdown is packaged with his hook and dagger/wrist blade. The former seems a little oversized compared to the equivalent accessory provided with Peru Kill, while the latter was omitted from that set. The hook is molded such that it only looks right when pegged into his right hand, via a 5mm peg set inside a squared-off socket that mostly conceals the hand, while the dagger can either be held in one of his hands or pegged into the same door panel slot as is used in vehicle mode. It can be fitted to either wrist, but the hook partially covers the socket on the right wrist. Both weapons are nicely detailed and closely resemble the weapons wielded by Lockdown in the movie, and the hook is even articulated... however it's very definitely too big and the hinge doesn't seem to be in the right place. The dagger, meanwhile, is a very tight fit in his hand, and looks pretty odd wielded that way anyway - it's a bit too long as a dagger, but too short to be a sword, and amost looks as though it should transform in some way... As far as I can see, there's nowhere to store either weapon on Lockdown when he's not using them - the tabs are a little too large for any of the likely-looking slots elsewhere on his body.
I had no complaints about the AoE figure's head sculpt, but it's clear that the new figure is superior even on that score - the head is bulked up with more helmet parts, and details resembling the stowed battlemask on top of his head. The face is every bit as finely detailed but rather than having blue plastic lightpiping, this figure has his eyes painted green. The paint over the face is metallic, but a darker shade than the silver used on the previous figure, and it really brings out all the intricate detail of the face. Again, it's a shame there's no battlemask option, but it would equally seem a shame to conceal the strikingly skeletal features of this character.
There are a lot of similarities in transformation between SS Lockdown and both TLK Cogman and Barricade. It's all fairly standard and simplistic, with the arms becoming the front wings and doors of the vehicle and the lower legs becoming the rear wings and back of the vehicle, but there are a few more incidental details, such as rotating the biceps 180° and swinging round his little ammo clips. One neat little feature that's largely unnecessary is that the central section of his chest has to be popped out to bulk up robot mode. It actually doesn't make a massive difference as the plate is fairly flat in and of itself, but it does make for better accuracy to the CGI. By and large, there are no significant hitches with transformation, though the head seems to catch one one side or the other when stowing it, and the wing flaps that are attached to the rear of the car and form part of his backpack don't always like to stay in place when transforming him back to vehicle mode. It strikes me that Peru Kill's transformation could be mostly replicated on a Deluxe class figure, so it's a shame to see so much of the vehicle shell essentially going to waste as a backpack, and so much of the transformation scheme borrowed from more traditional, mainline figures. There's actually more car shell on this Lockdown's back than there was on the Age of Extinction version, surprisingly, and it's bulkier, too, despite some more intelligent folding-up of its constituent parts.
Compared to the AoE version, Studio Series Lockdown's joints and overall level of articulation are a lot closer to the average, but still not perfect. The head is definitely on a ball joint on this figure, but its range is seriously limited by the massive protruding collar all round his neck, much like Peru Kill, though the head is not as sunken-looking. The arms are great - ball jointed shoulders and elbows, with a bicep swivel as part of transformation. It's quite a tight joint, though, partially because there's so little clearance for the wheels, and it almost feels as though it's not intended for articulation. Backward movement of his arms is a little hindered by the backpack, since the car's canopy extends beyond the shoulder joint on either side. He has a slightly greater range of waist movement than Peru Kill, and this is not limited by his backpack, but by the sculpted detail on the tops of the hips... and then the legs are just weird. They're sculpted in such a way as to force him into a leaning stance and, while it's a natural enough stance for a human, it looks artificial and excessive on a 14cm/5.5" action figure - ignoring the heel piece, his legs look almost digitigrade. The hips not only limit the waist articulation, they somewhat limit their own though, being ball joints, they tend only to need a small adjustment to access their full range. He has the standard thigh rotation joint, rather than that original's joint just above the knee, and the knee itself is a simple hinge. The ankle is hinged largely for transformation, but can be used to put him in a well-balanced squat.
Studio Series Lockdown is a far superior Deluxe class rendition of the character in the movie compared to the Age of Extinction version. It's by no means perfect - he's far too short in robot mode and rather too large in vehicle mode, so he makes a total mockery of the Studio Series' claims of accurate scale between figures - and isn't even anything outstanding within the Studio Series line. It's good to see Hasbro have a second try at a character they did poorly only a few years ago, and bodes well for later figures in the line. In and of itself, it's nothing particularly special except in terms of the extreme sculpted detail, and the fact that it's so similar in transformation to a couple of TLK figures would be disappointing if it weren't for the fact that I quite like both of them, too. Neither are outstanding examples of TransFormers toys - let alone those that came out of the movies - and SS Lockdown is kind of the same... it's currently the best available official representation of Lockdown, but the scale is off versus the rest of the toyline. If that's acceptable, then this figure is highly recommended... but if you want a better representation of the character without any particular scale requirements, Peru Kill is still the best option available at the moment.
This mold is being repainted an given a new head for release as Studio Series Shadow Raider - supposedly part of the crew on AoE Lockdown's ship - but, rather than a new version of the head gun, it'll come with Lockdown's Spark Extractor... so, in the space of three years, we'll have had three different interpretations of movie Lockdown (not including the myriad repaints of the AoE Deluxe), each one with a different set of weapons, but none with the full complement wielded by the character in the movie. I'm not sure I'll bother with Shadow Raider, but if I do it'll be to give SS Lockdown his masked head and the Spark Extractor - the figure will be entirely secondary. That said, it may be cheaper to look into the options available on Shapeways and the like.
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