He added: “He didn’t really have time to think, and acted”. Originally titled The Coup, the film was renamed following poor early test screenings, reportedly because audiences were confused by the word “coup”. It’s a strategy that increasingly depends on our seeing the locals as little more than knife-wielding, rape-threatening savages, to which the only reasonable response is to question the sadism of those behind the camera.
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Directed by John Erick Dowdle.
“However we have so many nice films coming”, Malone says.
Where does “No Escape” take place?
In No Escape, Owen Wilson plays Jack Dwyer, a one-time entrepreneur who has fallen on tough times and must move his family overseas to take a job with a company overseeing the construction of a new clean water project in an unnamed Southeast Asian country. On the journey they encounter the loud-shirted English tourist Hammond (Pierce Brosnan), a regular visitor to this corner of Asia, apparently lured by its sleazy nightlife.
Frightened and uncomprehending, Jack makes his way back to his wife and kids at the hotel, which is in a state of violent siege: Ordered to kill any foreigners they come across, the armed rebels go from room to room and making quick, vicious hackwork of the guests. Soon the entire hotel is under siege as riots escalate into full-scale civil war.
How much escape is in this movie?
Meanwhile, the endlessly smug Wilson’s transformation from lost-at-sea tourist to fighting machine never quite comes across believably, nor does his penchant for leaving his family alone at key moments.
Intense as all that is, Dowdle has still better stuff in store: A vertiginous scene on a rooftop that’s more thrilling than anything in the last couple of James Bond movies. This is not Owen Wilson’s John Wick; it’s just him taking a break from comedy to do some well-crafted action. He makes it work largely because Dwyer is a suburban Everyman driven to desperate measures to protect his family. Here, he’s smartly cast as a sarcastic dad who is nobody’s idea of an action hero; Wilson is great with the actresses who play his daughters and he’s vulnerable in a way he hasn’t shown on screen before. Jerins and Geare are both likeable moppets, though their principal function is to serve as vulnerable trophy targets, ramping up the jeopardy stakes.
Brosnan’s a hoot playing a grizzled ex-pat who wears a tiger’s tooth around his neck, sports a variety of nasty scars and talks of once having had a family of his own. One and a half stars out of four.
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But the month still has the stigma of serving as a dumping ground for movies unsuitable for more competitive weekends. Reveling in xenophobia and then assuaging its guilt by criticizing the West too, it’s a disingenuous mess that’s only redeemed, if ever-so-briefly, by Brosnan’s amusing embodiment of Hammond as a ragged, dissolute 007 apt to change into sweatpants before hitting the strip clubs in order to “let them know I mean business”. All the same, Dowdle delivers enough adrenalized tension to maintain his track record of profitable, populist pulp. The bombastic score, by Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders, hammers home the point that this is a thrill ride for the nerves, not the brain.
