Film Review: ‘No Escape’ heads straight into the fray
“No Escape” director John Erick Dowdle — who also co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Drew — doesn’t beat around the bush. After the credits and an essentially unnecessary slam-bang opening scene, we meet the members of the Dwyer family — husband Jack (Owen Wilson), wife Annie (Lake Bell), and young daughters Beeze (Claire Geare) and Lucy (Sterling Jerins) — as they fly to some unnamed southeast Asian country. (The story was inspired by Cambodian uprisings, but the film was shot in Thailand.)
The Dwyers have uprooted themselves from the U.S. so Jack can take a job with the faux benevolent Cantrell Corp. Annie and the kids are not particularly enthused about the change, but things are slightly eased when they meet Hammond (Pierce Brosnan), a gregarious Australian, who gives them some tips about their new home.
They’ve barely finished unpacking when Jack goes looking for an English-language newspaper and finds himself in the middle of a violent insurrection. He staggers back to their hotel, which has already been invaded by ruthless, armed revolutionaries. The latter are going door to door slaughtering reactionaries and foreigners.
This may sound like a big dose of exposition, but less than 10 minutes of screen time has transpired since the end of the opening credits (Dowdle doesn’t dawdle). We already know all we need to know about the Dwyers, because they’ve been drawn in broad and familiar strokes. They are the Average But Not Quite Trouble-Free American Household as Hollywood has always presented it — that is, white, straight, culturally middle-class or higher, with professional credentials. You’ve seen ‘em a million times: they’re the dominant culture’s fallacious notion of “the average family.”
The Dwyers escape their hotel with no obvious place to go. With the exception of one brief scene of rest — a scene that is unfortunately hokey and banal — the ensuing 80 minutes are nonstop action. No matter how many times the family escapes the immediate danger, they always end up in an even worse situation. They jump from frying pan to fire ... to hotter fire ... to even yet hotter fire.
Even though we know the chance of any of them getting killed approaches zero, their plight still provokes fear. And who knows? Maybe Dowdle, in a crazed moment, decided to kill off one of the little girls. That would be aesthetically daring, but it would also be aesthetically suicidal. The audience would come after the filmmakers with pitchforks.
“No Escape” has been widely criticized as xenophobic, “morally rank,” and (my favorite) “reprehensible to the core.” But I’m as PC as the next guy, and, to tell the truth, the numbers on my Racism Readout barely changed; my Authoritarianism Alarm issued no more than a few halfhearted blats.
Dowdle covered a lot of bases in an attempt to frustrate such political criticism. Yes, 90% of the locals we see are bloodthirsty killing machines; but the film makes it clear that they have legitimate grievances and that those grievances are almost all caused by the big industrialized countries and the companies that run them. The list of characters includes several sympathetic and/or heroic Asians. The contrast between the family’s shallow notions of misfortune and misery and the locals’ problems is stark. The only reason that Jack Dwyer has never killed a man before is simply that he’s never had to.
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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).