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No Escape: High Tension, Low Concept, Great Acting from Some Big Name Cast
by Sandra Olmsted
Writer/director John Erick Dowdle’s No Escape delivers plenty of gripping, edge-of-the-seat suspense and action, but lacks character development and depth. Thankfully, the acting is topnotch! After his own business fails, Jack Dwyer (Owen Wilson) takes a job with an American company contracted to build a water purification plant in an unnamed Southeast Asian country which borders Vietnam.
On the long plane ride to this new adventure, Jack and his wife Annie (Lake Bell) and their young daughters Lucy (Sterling Jerins) and Beeze (Claire Geare) meet Hammond (Pierce Brosnan), whose injuries telegraph operative despite what he tells Beeze. Hammond also offers them a ride to the hotel and introduces them to his buddy Kenny Rogers (Sahajak Boonthanakit), a local cabbie who has adopted the name and dress of his favorite singer.
Unbeknownst to the Dwyer’s, but perhaps not Hammond and Kenny, a coup takes down the prime minister over the contract that was signed with company that employs Jack. Now an angry mob is out in the streets ready to kill all Americans, all foreigners, and anyone who has helped them. While Jack thinks he is working to provide clean water to this country, bigger issues of foreign policy and economics are at play. Soon the mob is kicking down doors and killing people in the hotel, and Jack and Annie will need all their mental and physical resources to preserve their likable little family.
The No Escape, co-written by John Erick Dowdle and his brother Drew Dowdle, veers into a pattern of chase, hide, and escape, as Jack tries to keep the family “ten
steps” ahead of violent death. They have witnessed the horrible violence and murder from hiding places that barely concealed them, which makes the threat less really at times. At several critical junctures, the family encounters Hammond and Kenny and sometimes the kindness of strangers. Because Jack’s face was on a hotel welcome sign, the leader of the mob wants to get Jack.
Fortunately, Wilson makes Jack’s ability to think on his feet and kick into survival mode believable, and Bell embodies every motherly instinct perfectly while proving she tough and in survival mode, too. Brosnan always plays the secret agent type well, even as he ages. Sahajak Boonthanakit’s Kenny is extremely likable and not seen enough. All the characters’ development, especially the mob and its leader, relies on stereotypes telegraphed too loudly in the writing.
No Escape covers the same territory of Westerners in peril and Western privilege as J.A. Bayona’s The Impossible, about 2004 Christmas Day tsunami, except the tsunami in No Escape is a dark-skinned, peasant army portrayed as having far less depth than a mindless force nature. Because the mob and its leaders are always in shadow, at a distance, or made indistinct in some way, they never take on a personality that fits with Hammond’s description of them as just guys “protecting their families” like Jack is. When No Escape does get to the reason for the upraising, Bronson’s character delivers the message of American and British economic imperialism heavy handily; however, the Fordite theories of economic and political influence aren’t as simple as this writers’ sound-bite naiveté would have the audience believe. No Escape is no Syriana, the 2005 film about oil, water, and political power in the Middle East.
No Escape is rated R for strong violence including a sexual assault, and for language and runs 102 minutes of intense suspense and violence. Released by The Weinstein Company, No Escape is in theaters now and for a cheap thrill ride, it’s edge-of-the-seat entertainment.
