How entertaining?     ★★☆☆☆
Thought provoking? ★☆☆☆☆

25 August 2015

This a movie review of NO ESCAPE (2015).

By Hemanth Kissoon

“Perhaps I should change into my sweatpants? To let them know I mean business,” Hammond (Pierce Brosnan)
 
Who doesn't love a siege movie, right? DIE HARD. ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13. RIO BRAVO. Rather than the hardened likes of Bruce Willis and John Wayne facing off, NO ESCAPE aims for something more empathetic rather than vicarious thrills. The filmmakers have opted for an ordinary family caught up in carnage. There is of course the movable siege chase movie, and NO ESCAPE evolves into that. A strong start gives way to a weird mix of gruesome violence and sentimentality, and TAKEN-esque dubious foreigner stereotyping.

Opening on a pulsating score accompanying a prime minister being killed, and then zooming back 17 hours, we meet the Dwyer family on a plane. They have upped sticks from Texas to move to Asia because the business of paterfamilias, Jack (Owen Wilson), folded. An engineer, he now works for American company, Cardiff, involved in the waterworks industry.
 
Try as one might, one did not hear what country they travelled to, to set up a new home with wife, Annie (Lake Bell), and two young daughters in tow. One at first guessed it was Thailand, but the only geography eventually involves a short river ride to Vietnam. The countries that border Vietnam are Laos and Cambodia. Perhaps no mention is explicitly made because the country gets such a drubbing by the movie. At one point early on Annie calls their locale not the third world but the “fourth world.” Like me internally, Jack responds, “I didn’t know that existed.” NO ESCAPE is unlikely to be on any national tourist board’s website cinema recommendations.

What unfurls over the course of the runtime speaks of a cruel people given no personalities (see also BLACK HAWK DOWN). This is a film aiming at the lowest common denominator TAKEN crowd, and reminds of how MAN ON FIRE portrayed Mexico as an irredeemable kidnap capital of the world. Within hours of a citywide uprising, the family have no choice but to eat barbecued dog. The levels of insult are not well hidden.
 
On the plane, they meet Hammond (Pierce Brosnan putting on a cockney accent), who happens to be staying at their hotel. Brosnan spends his parsimonious screen time turning up at predictable opportune moments to save the family. No one else mind. (One wonders if Brosnan consoles himself on appearing in such bad projects – LOVE PUNCH, A LONG WAY DOWN – by reminding himself that Sean Connery post-Bond also hit the doldrums before bouncing back with THE NAME OF THE ROSE and THE UNTOUCHABLES?)

On the morning after their arrival, there appears to be no phone and internet, or delivery of the daily newspapers. Jack piqued goes in search of a newsagent only to be caught up in a violent coup. Both the police and demonstrators don’t hold back on each other. Running to rejoin his family, the hotel is surrounded, and Westerners begin to be executed. Progressively the deaths get more brutal, reaching B-movie exploitation degrees.

Intelligent analysis of geopolitics à la ’71 is almost non-existent. At one point, Hammond explains to Jack that the rebellion is a result of corporate greed emanating from outside the country. Such brief contextualisation is tokenistic at best, and undermined further when Jack has to clarify who exactly Hammond works for: The “British C.I.A.” He doesn’t say Mi6, just in case, it seems, any of the non-nuance is lost on certain segments of the audience.

By the coda you’ll be reaching for the sick bucket, unable to hold down the mawkishness shovelled at us.

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