Movie Review: 'No Escape'

By Stephen Silver:

It’s hard to imagine a movie starring Owen Wilson as a loving father protecting his family being synonymous with words like “tone-deaf,” “geopolitically clueless,” “loathsome,” or even “racist.” But No Escape pulls off the feat. This is a spectacularly ill-conceived thriller that represents a new nadir in the Taken ripoff genre.

Wilson stars as an executive with an American corporation who goes to live in an unnamed Southeast Asian country, ostensibly to provide the nation with clean drinking water. Arriving in the country along with his wife (Lake Bell) and daughters (Sterling Jerins and Claire Geare), Wilson soon finds his family in immense danger when rebels stage a coup and lay siege to the capital city. The majority of the film consists of the family running around the city in order to stay one step ahead of gunmen hellbent on shooting everyone they see, Americans especially.

The country they’re in is never named- it borders Vietnam, so that pretty much narrows it down to Laos, Cambodia or China, and it’s not China. But ultimately, that doesn’t matter, because none of the stuff involving Asia or the people in it are of any concern to this film. Of all of the Asian characters in the movie, only a handful even have names, much less actual speaking lines. We see hundreds of people die onscreen and probably many, many more off. But the film isn’t the slightest bit concerned with any of those people- the entirety of the movie’s stakes are that the family of Americans who’s been in the country for about 24 hours gets out safely.

Sure, there’s a stab at political relevancy, with one two-minute expository speech meant to do all of the geopolitical heavy lifting to explain the plot and explain the historical third world meddling of the CIA and other Western nations. But this is just incongruous and out of place- as though someone were reading a Noam Chomsky essay aloud in the middle of a movie whose values are about 180 degrees the opposite.

It also doesn’t mean the movie has much understanding of geopolitics. The rebels appear to be secular and possibly leftist, but they behave almost exactly like ISIS, including summary executions of just about everyone they see. They also, hours into the coup, have acquired seemingly all the weapons in the world, including tanks, helicopters and unlimited AK-47s.

No Escape is different from the Taken films in a couple of key ways: Since the Wilson character is a corporate bureaucrat and not an ex-CIA badass, a good portion of the ass-kicking is outsourced to Pierce Brosnan as a mysterious adventurer (although Wilson gets a couple of fight scenes on his own, as does Bell.) Brosnan is by far the best thing about the movie and I’d have much rather watched a version of this story that was about him instead.

And also, instead of the hero rescuing his daughter from kidnappers, Wilson brings his small daughters along for pretty much the entire movie, therefore subjecting them to about 15 different near-death experiences, not to mention having to watch dozens of people shot- and their mother nearly raped- right in front of them. It’s somewhat shocking that the film repeatedly putting these kids in danger for cheap thrills isn’t even the most repugnant thing about it.

Beyond that? It’s directed very poorly, by John Erick Dowdle, and shot even worse. The fight scenes are subpar, with a climactic brawl almost impossible to follow.

There have been a couple of amazing documentaries in recent years that dealt with the coups in Southeast Asia, the horrific violence that followed, and the effects on that country still being felt decades later. The films are 2013’s The Act of Killing and this year’sThe Look of Silence, both directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, and they’re about the coup and genocide in Indonesia in the 1960s. No Escape plays as though those films had instead focused on a family of American white people who visited the country for one day.

No Escape opens Wednesday.