Review: No Escape

Engineer Owen Wilson relocates his family to a part of South-East Asia for work purposes. On arrival the multinational water company employee finds that there is a large section of the locals who have started a violent coup, putting Wilson, wife Lake Bell and their daughters in potentially serious harm. They are forced to accept the help of a shadowy British agent (a charismatic Pierce Brosnan) if there are going to stay alive and make it to refuge in Vietnam. Yeah, Americans fleeing to Vietnam for safety.

 

In the 80s, this would’ve been made by Cannon and starring Chuck Norris. This 2015 film’s director John Erick Dowdle (“Quarantine”, “Devil”) and co-writer/brother Drew (“Quarantine”) don’t seem to realise it’s no longer the 80s anymore. I just don’t think the world needs such a lousy, hardly racially sensitive action/thriller, even though Owen Wilson is a vastly superior actor to Chuck Norris and he’s not disastrously lesser in the action department, either. I felt very uneasy throughout this film, and it was only partly due to the nauseating and unnecessary shaky-cam of cinematographer Leo Hinstin (who has lensed a lot of short films).

 

Every now and then Owen Wilson seems to want to play action hero, and while he’s quite good at it, this film is ultimately no better than the woefully generic “Behind Enemy Lines”. It’s unworthy of him. You can pinpoint the moment where it all goes wrong: It’s when Wilson walks into the gang war/street funeral from “Big Trouble in Little China” that you wonder why in the hell this is being made in 2015, and the film doesn’t get any better from there. If it isn’t racist and foul, it’s certainly not remotely helpful or necessary. It’s well-acted by everybody, but so what?

 

Kudos to the director for making jumping from building to building look as difficult as possible (though I still don’t find it plausible), but I just wasn’t with this one at all. It’s the kind of old-school actioner that just doesn’t fly when you try to make one today (And it’s probably a big reason why we haven’t seen a sequel to “True Lies”, even though I think it’d be quite easy to do one without using Islamic terrorism). Meanwhile, I also think that as good as Wilson is in the lead, Pierce Brosnan’s more ready-and-able character seems for all money a much more interesting and appropriate choice for the lead. Having said that, it’s Brosnan’s character who gives a speech that outlines just how dishonest this trash is, where he basically says it’s the UK and US’s fault that all of this is happening. Fine, but showing these bad guys raping and murdering just because the UK and US have put them in a shitty socioeconomic position seems to suggest that the filmmakers don’t really believe what they’re selling. Otherwise they’d show that POV a lot better, and not to mention they’d probably make the locals not so nameless and faceless. I get that some places in that neck of the woods (and other necks of the woods) do have some bad dudes. I get that. But this film isn’t a serious examination of violent unrest in South-East Asia, nor does it convince in trying to present the other side of the argument, either. No attempt is really made to give voice to the rebels, except through that one bit of dialogue from Brosnan, an ex-pat Brit. This is the same film that doesn’t even have the balls to name the specific country it’s depicting. It’s pure bullshit schlocky exploitation (and not of the good kind), and I’m shocked that seemingly intelligent actors like Wilson, Brosnan, and Lake Bell would participate in something of this nature.

 

The best-acted bad film of 2015, this one is completely rank on a thematic and geopolitical level, and dreadfully shot to boot. There’s probably a market for this kind of thing even in 2015, but I’m not it. This isn’t helpful, and it’s not enjoyable.

 

Rating: D