"Behind Enemy Lines" was a long 14 years ago and that barely worked with Wilson playing the action hero.
No escape movie movie#
The body count zooms way out of control while our family man Jack, with the later help of Hammond, tries to sneak his family to safety or asylum.Īs if you couldn't tell by the top-billed presence alone of Owen Wilson in a movie like this, the casting is way off. In fact, ugly jumped out the window and got smeared in the sidewalk in favor of nihilist grotesqueness. This makes Benghazi look like a bar fight between fat guys. Westerners are being executed on site, left and right, via firing squad, clubs to the head, machete hacks, or intentional collisions with truck bumpers. The police are no match for the insurgents and the mob descends on the Dwyer's hotel. In a movie such as "No Escape," they are one-dimensional savage Asian stereotypes armed to the teeth and thirstier than zombies for bloodshed. These aren't loud protesters shaking fists and toting signs.
Jack becomes caught in the middle of a brutal clash in the streets between protesters and police. Unbeknownst to our protagonists, that opening high-level assassination has set off an enormous anti-Western political coup. They are shown around by Hammond, played by Pierce Brosnan,a pseudo-British/Australian traveler, who took the same flight and is staying at the same English-friendly hotel in the city.
The newly expat family are fish out of water upon arrival. He is a meager American businessman for a water company who is uprooting his wife Annie (Lake Bell, playing older than her age) and two daughters (Sterling Jerins of "World War Z" and newcomer Claire Geare) to move to an (appropriately) unnamed Southeast Asian country (filmed in Thailand) for a big new job. Seventeen hours earlier, we meet Owen Wilson's Jack Dwyer. The film opens with a smoothly mysterious and coordinated assassination scene of a important diplomat right under the nose of his tight security force. "No Escape" undoubtedly has an edge, but it's a raw and misshapen one. It lacks the spine to make the proverbial wringer the characters are put through matter in some way, shape, or form outside of exploiting our fears and senses. However, its purpose and delivery is senseless and nearly reprehensible. To its credit, the action is unpredictable, unnerving, and flies at a white-knuckle pace. This is a horror film disguised as an expat drama. No offense, but "No Escape," the rudderless and violent thriller from the makers of "As Above, So Below," "Devil," and "Quarantine" can't muster a strong political statement to back up what it's selling. That's a pulpy political thriller done right, where the body count and the violence entertain as much as they matter. Take a classic like "Die Hard." Now, that's not your typical political thriller, but it powers the peril of the hero with American bravura and gives its stock Cold War ethnic stereotype villains oodles of personality and purpose. If the statement is flimsy, the movie will be flimsy behind it. They need a stance and the bolder the better. No matter if a film is going the pulpy route for cheap thrills or the proper route for dramatic resonance, political thrillers, by their very nature and definition, need to capitalize on a political statement.
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