No Escape
(2015)
(SPOILERS)
Alternatively titled Those Lousy Central
Americans Really Want to Kill Poor Owen Wilson and His Dearly Beloved, this picture received not a little
lambasting on its release for perceived brazen racism and xenophobia, the fear
of Johnny (or gooky) foreigner writ large. And that’s not without some
justification. No Escape is certainly
a ridiculously insensitive movie, in which an all-American family of the United
States variety are relentlessly pursued by faceless hoards, bent on their
destruction, after a coup unleashes anarchy in their newly arrived locale (and
Owen only went there to help the natives, that kindly patrician westerner, him!).
But that’s probably (I say probably, as I’m feeling charitable) more because
this a horror movie disguised as a suspense thriller disguised as cautionary
tale of the dangers of being an expat in an unstable locale; it’s made by a
horror director, highly effectively it must be said, and his gangs of nationality-obscure
locals (the country borders Vietnam, it was filmed in Thailand) are essentially
zombie legions, or the legions of the damned found in any urban, night-shrouded
horror.
To wit, I
don’t think No Escape is necessarily the
same kind of reprehensible exhibit that, say, Blackhawk Down is. Opportunistic yes, but that comes with the genre
trappings; you can see at every turn that John Erick Dowdle (co-written with
his brother Drew) is thinking “How can I really
make this unnerving, really tighten
the screws?” and he’s very successful at hitting his target. From hapless
Wilson getting caught in a street fight, to the mayhem in his besieged hotel,
the tension is ratcheted up with devilish skill. I’m not familiar with the
Dowdles’ previous pictures, but if this is their attempt to broaden their palette
(John devised the story following a near miss with the 2006 Thai coup), he very
nearly succeeds, just unfortunately failing to make the content in his genre
switch any more respectable.
So yeah, No Escape might put the fear up
Americans considering a sojourn in foreign climes, but it comes from the same
place as putting the fear up a rural type finding themselves alone in the big
city. The mechanism is more visceral than political, even though such flagrant
disregard isn’t to be commended.
And
besides, there is at least a dump of wholly unfinessed exposition, courtesy of
Pierce Brosnan in a top-form supporting role (“Got into a foit with a toiger”), enjoying himself as a less-than-suave
secret agent (and showing he still has the moves nearly a decade and a half on
from his last 007 outing). He admits it’s the gluttonous West that has caused
the coup (“Guys like me pave the way for
guys like you to wind up here”), going on to note that the undiscerning victims
don’t usually fight back; the corporations who run the UK and the US offer a
loan to pay for their services, knowing the debt can’t be repaid, and then “we own them”.
The problem
is, excised from the horror genre, or even the more flamboyant action movie,
the successive feats of unlikely derring-do increasingly beggar belief, from
Wilson throwing his kids across streets onto roofs opposite, to Lake Bell going
apeshit mental with a shovel. The push-pull between grounding and pure pulp
exploitation is ultimately too uneasy to make No Escape a winner, the high point coming early on, when Wilson
desperately kills a man and his reaction is every bit as shocked as it should
be. But as the ante is upped, with the kids used for increasingly flagrant,
tension-rousing purposes (including doing very stupid things) and Bell being
subject to an attempted rape, the feeling of being led into something much less
judiciously managed begins to take over. Nevertheless, with the right script, Dowdle
could make something really impressive at some point.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.