Review: No Escape
Working well with its elemental ingredients, No Escape is a briskly paced and serviceable action thriller whose cheap emotional manipulations and borderline xenophobia leave a sour aftertaste.
Set in an unnamed and politically unstable nation, the film begins with the country's corrupt leader being assassinated by revolutionaries. It is unfortunate then that American engineer Jack Dwyer (Owen Wilson) has just been hired by a Western corporation to work on improving the country's water supply. Jack arrives at the hotel with his wife Annie (Lake Bell) and his two daughters Lucy (Sterling Jerins) and Beeze (Claire Geare), and is dismayed to discover that the telephones, television, and internet are down all over the city. Fair enough, but surely they would have been fully functional in his hometown of Austin, Texas as a quick Google search would have surely warned him to stay far and away from this dangerous country.
Barely 12 hours pass before Jack sets off to buy a newspaper only to be caught in the middle of a standoff between the armed rebels and the city police in riot gear. Director John Erick Dowdle employs the first of many slow-motion flourishes as bodies are bloodied and beaten. Screams establish themselves as the permanent soundtrack to the movie. Jack races through the chaos and confusion, arriving back at the hotel in time to see an American tourist get shot in the back of the head by a group of rebels, who are clamouring for more Caucasian blood.
From thereon in, Jack and his family flee from one perilous situation to another, barely thinking of anything else but their immediate survival. Indeed, the first half hour of their ordeal offers relentless and often gripping action as the Dwyer family narrowly escape the rebels, who are knocking down door after door and hacking away at any and all foreigners. The Dwyers make their way to the hotel roof and join the other survivors, who inform them that the rebels have seized control and are killing any Westerns who work for Jack's new employers. That bit of exposition done, Dowdle doubles down on the action, putting the Dwyers through ever more extreme paces though none can match the downright drastic and utterly laughable measure Jack takes of flinging both his girls from one rooftop to another.
The propulsion quickly accelerates into monotonous tedium, and one soon wonders if and when the film will ever end. Wilson is not exactly the first person that enters the mind for this type of role, but his laconic stoner persona somehow works within No Escape's albeit flimsy structure. Bell, a last-minute replacement for a pregnant Michelle Monaghan, displays some gumption in an otherwise thankless and thinly written role.
A grizzled Pierce Brosnan cashes a paycheck as Hammond, a British expat who has quite the knack for showing up at the most opportune moments to save the family. He also serves as the film's dubious moral compass, commenting on the uprising as the natives' payback for western corporate colonialism. Except this all comes off as pure claptrap. For one thing, there's no shading to the rebels' motivations and all are broadly sketched as bloodthirsty savages. For another, Brosnan utters this line with the thickest, fakest Cockney accent this side of holiday panto.
No Escape
Directed by: John Erick Dowdle
Written by: John Erick Dowdle, Drew Dowdle
Starring: Owen Wilson, Lake Bell, Pierce Brosnan, Sterling Jerins, Claire Geare
