Not to be confused with the Ray Liotta sci-fi action film directed by Martin Campbell (“Ray Liotta sci-fi action film” will never not be a strange thing to type), No Escape saw Owen Wilson once again trying a more serious genre on for size. But while his previous forays into action saw him become a Fighter Navigator, a cowboy, or a space faring oil driller, this 2015 thriller saw him as more of an everyman when he and his family come a cropper after becoming expats in a politically tumultuous country in Southeast Asia suddenly goes off in an explosion of violence.
However, while the concept of good guys on the run from the population an entire city has proven time and time again to have the goods when it comes to sustaining tension (Escape From New York and ’71 being just two of them), we soon find that not even Pierce Brosnan in yet another sleazy, post-Bond spy role can save the film for some uncomfortably questionable racial choices.
Jack Dwyer is a new employee of the American corporation, Cardiff, that’s recently got the contract to handle the water supply of an unnamed South Eastern country and as a result, he and his family has flown over there to live. However, not long after arriving and bumping into friendly (and horny) Brit traveller, Hammond, on the way to their hotel, Jack, his wife, Annie and their two rather difficult children, Lucy and Briegel, find themselves in something of a terrifying pickle when a full blown coup d’etat erupts all around them. Caught out in the violent chaos out in the streets, Jack has to try and make it back to the hotel while foreigners are being dragged out into the street and executed primarily because of the fact that his company has taken control of the native’s water supply.
Barely reaching his hotel by the skin of his teeth, Jack now has to convince his wife the political sky is falling while corralling his difficult, young daughter before the rebels break into the hotel and start violently checking people out early with machetes. However, when things look their most bleak, Hammond arrives and immediately shows that he’s no ordinary sex tourist and buys the Dwyers some time to make it to the roof where the other survivors have taken shelter, but it soon becomes obvious that the rebels will simply not give up until every foreigner in the region is staining their knives crimson. Forced to try and make it through the back streets and alleys of a city that’s descended into hell, it seems that the Dwyer’s reservoir of luck must run dry sooner or later, but when Hammond resurfaces to lend a hand (and something of an explanation), their route to safety is clear.
Make it in one piece to the Vietnam border or else there will be…. (wait for it) no escape.
There are a lot of points about No Escape which prop up the argument that the film is a very solid thriller that’s about as pumped full of threat as an overcrowded dive bar during kick out time. John Erick Dowdle, has something of a prior experience in the horror genre with The Poughkeepsie Tapes, [REC] remake Quarantine and As Above So Below already under his directorial belt and so at multiple times, he manages to tease out legitimate danger from this scenario as we constantly find out lead family thwarted at every turn by a murderous enemy that swarm like zombies. Death is brutal and hope is repeatedly crushed as the Dwyers stumble from one atrocity to another as bullets whizz and machetes swoosh in their general direction literally non-stop for the final hour and a half of the film. However, this does lead to a few problems that come part and parcel with such a relentless experience and from a storytelling point of few, the Dwyers themselves are just a quartet of stock victims you can find everywhere. Sure, Owen Wilson and Lake Bell bring their everyperson charm to the film and the later dies the mounting tension a favour by not breathlessly proclaiming “wow” once – but there’s really not that much to them beyond being a family in peril.
It also doesn’t help that Dowdle brings a few stock horror tricks to try and strangle every inch of tension out of the scenario he can, but the problem is that if you’re having your characters make blatently stupid decisions in a movie that (presumably) is supposed to be taken far more seriously than a slasher or a, it’s probably not a good idea to have your audience screaming frustrated insults at the screen. Thought you got wound up by the children characters in your average Jurassic Park sequel? Well wait until you get a load of the kids in this movie who go so far out of their way to be difficult and annoying, you’d swear that the rebels had slipped them some cash to do so. I’ll admit that having a pair of young children with no survival instincts whatsoever act like anchors makes the situation far more lethal, but it comes at the cost that you genuinely start to hate these kids (the characters, not the actors) as they whine, stonewall and drag their heels all the way to becoming utterly unsympathetic.
However, when Dowdle gets going, he does manage to tease some genuinely heart stopping moments from the film, like when a potential rescue helicopter has everyone gasping with relief but turns out to contain a gun welding rebel, or the initial riot between police and the angry natives. And it’s here where we reach No Escape’s main issue. While the movie takes steps to try and disguise what country it’s actually supposed to be set in (although the fact that the language used on posters is merely Cambodian Khmer turned upside-down certainly wasn’t fooling the Cambodians) and Pierce Brosnan pops up to say that it’s the American corporations that’s actually caused the problems in the first place, it doesn’t really excuse how badly the Native rebels are portrayed. I understand that suggesting this third world country is astonishingly backward adds to the culture shock of a white family being forced to move their and I also understand that the film is potentially saying that corporate greed across the globe has turned these people into outraged, brutal animals, but there’s simply no avoiding that the movie sinks too easily into “white people good, non-white bad” in an effort to keep things nice and simple. You certainly aren’t thinking “oh boy, those damn corporations have really messed up the indigenous population” when they execute people in the streets by running them over with trucks and essentially rape and mutilate at the drop of a hat and having a movie powered by such xenophobia in 2015 is highly questionable at best.
Thank the cinema gods for Pierce Brosnan then who shows up in yet another one of his super sleazy, post Bond roles that sees him as a British agent slash sex tourist and essentially steals the show. Adding the political gravitas the movie desperately needs and swaggering through his disappointingly shot screen time like a man who’s seen it all, you get the film may have been a lot easier to swallow if the focus of the film had been switched and it was Hammond who was the main character as he struggles to save a family from the mess his government helped cause and an angry population who actually have a point.
If you’re able to ignore the blunt politics at play here, the film proves to be a solid-as-fuck thriller that contains more than it’s fair share of heart stopping moments. However, some heavy-handed handling of the more racially charged issues means that when it comes to some insensitive portrayals of anyone who isn’t white, there’s ironically no escape for No Escape.
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