Film review: No Escape

Dir: John Erick Dowdle

With: Pierce Brosnan, Lake Bell, Owen Wilson

Running time: 103 minutes

WHEN faced with an existential threat that would confound the age’s finest philosophers, cinema likes to take a moment to consider the fears and then flat out exploit them. Shamelessly. From teenage rebellion to nuclear annihilation, there is nothing, in cinema’s view, that cannot be addressed by Marlon Brando in a biker jacket or Godzilla rampaging through Manhattan.

In John Erick Dowdle’s No Escape, the fear is of “out there”. One American family, led by Owen Wilson and Lake Bell, are about to find out that to get on a plane and leave the US behind is to open the door to a world of mayhem. Given recent, real events, such as the attack on the Amsterdam to Paris train, there is perhaps an audience out there for an action thriller which asks, “What would you do if the chips were down?”. No answers are to be found in the ridiculous No Escape.

Dowdle’s thriller opens in an unnamed country in southeast Asia. After a scene setting incident we cut to 35,000 feet up, where Annie and Jack Dwyer (Bell and Wilson) are putting a brave face on things for the sake of their two young daughters. Jack’s engineering career in the US has come to a crashing halt, so he has had to drag his family half way across the world for work. Jack is a migrant, but one of those well to do, welcome kind. There will be no fighting his way through barbed wire or on to a train for Jack. The water company for which he will be working even puts out a welcome sign at the plush hotel where he and the family will be staying.

Also staying in the hotel is the mysterious Mr Hammond, who was sitting behind the family on the plane. Hammond (Pierce Brosnan) is an old hand in this new nation and gives Jack a few pointers. But what could possibly go wrong in this sunshine paradise?

The answer to that comes in quick, slick fashion as Jack goes to fetch the morning paper. The phones have not been working in the hotel, nor the television, but surely that is just a glitch. In the space of a few moments, however, Dowdle turns the tables on Jack and the audience. The streets are quiet, too quiet, and why are there riot cops facing machete wielding protesters?

Expecting nothing more taxing than his first day at work, Jack and his family are now engaged in a life or death struggle to survive as mobs besiege the hotel, slaughtering innocents as they go. That decision not to name the country suddenly seems a wise one. Had the filmmakers done so, there would have been the mother of all diplomatic incidents, so cartoonishly bloodthirsty are the rebels.

But then there is much about Dowdle’s picture that is cartoonish, its politics above all. After most of the 103 minute running time has been given over to showing how nasty the one-dimensional rebels are, the film devotes seconds to explaining what their beef is, in this case the seizing of their water supply by a multinational company backed by foreign governments. Hardly even-handed, but then that is hardly the point of Dowdle’s picture. Like the Liam Neeson franchise Taken, it aims to show that when it comes to survival, a dad/husband has gotta do what a dad/husband has got to do. Mum can lend a hand, too.

The surprise here is that it is Golden Retriever-turned-human Wilson (Midnight in Paris, Zoolander) and indie movie queen Bell (In a World) who are on bone-breaking, thrill-spilling duty, and a fine job they make of it too. There are some genuinely heart in the mouth moments in Dowdle’s film, and the fact that Bell and Wilson are in the thick of them helps the movie along no end.

Ultimately, the push and pull between the cartoonish and the credible proves too much and events take a turn towards the land of silly. For all Bell and Wilson’s efforts, there is no escaping that.