I’m disgusted to report this, because it tends to give the film some visceral credit, but there are scenes in No Escape that made me squirm like few other films in recent memory. Director John Erick Dowdle films his story of a family under siege in Southeast Asia with the kind of gut-wrenching, intestine-squeezing terror more often associated with underground horror flicks.
It starts not long after the arrival of Jack Dwyer (Owen Wilson), his wife Annie (Lake Bell) and their two daughters to an upscale hotel in Thailand, or it could be Cambodia — we’re never really sure. Jack is visiting on behalf of an American business interest, the implication being that he’s “here to help” by, you know, pillaging the nation’s water supply. John Dowdle and his brother Drew, who co-wrote the screenplay with him, correctly capture one aspect of this combustible region of earth, with its mix of First World comforts and Third World poverty, where luxury resorts sprout from slums: They understand how quickly serenity can yield to apocalypse.
Jack’s morning walk, to find an American newspaper, is quickly interrupted by a phalanx of riot-gear officers on one side and an equally impenetrable mass of club- and rock-wielding protesters on the other. Dowdle’s camera, jerking and tumbling amid the bloody tumult, can barely convey the carnage that follows, as Jack scurries frantically back to his hotel, which is already under assault.
For Wilson, who is nobody’s first-round draft pick for a 21st-century action star, this is a long way from the mannered, dry-martini comedies of Wes Anderson. But he’s competent enough at channeling abject panic and survivalist wiles. Jack soon realized that he didn’t stumble into an isolated incident of discontent. It’s more like the opening salvo in an armed revolution, with the dirty capitalist Dwyer the main target.
No Escape becomes another single-minded survival story, drowning in its narrative myopia for the privileged, pretty emissaries of American imperialism; pay no attention to the endless barrage of corpses that litter every stop of their escape route, slaughtered by an enemy as ubiquitous, innumerable and ceaselessly driven as a zombie horde. Just keep your sympathies on the relatable Caucasians.
You may feel some shame by falling under the movie’s suspenseful spell every now and then, and you should. No Escape is too morally odious to justify its effective genre mechanics. The Dowdles find crass pleasure in their stylized set pieces — one moment, involving a slow-motion transition from one rooftop to another, can only be received as hysterical parody — to the extent that the torture porn far outstrips the film’s already questionable politics.
It’s certainly a waste for the considerable talents of Lake Bell, subjected to playing a damsel in distress for most of the film. She’s also saddled with the script’s only (to that point) moment of unadulterated, manipulative sentimentality, and though she’s a skillful enough actor to sell this claptrap, I don’t think anybody in the audience bought it.
For a while, I rather liked Pierce Brosnan’s supporting role as a lascivious, hard-bitten British vacationer, because it seemed a more age-appropriate character than his unlikely superman in last year’s The November Man. There’s a lack of spy suavity in his tousled performance, and in one of his first scenes, he sings awful karaoke in the lobby of Jack’s hotel. But when the shoe drops, he becomes another Brosnan Action Hero, albeit a late-career model.
It’s worth considering how well this movie will be received in Southeast Asia, whose natives are presented as anonymous terrorists by a director who values one family of an exploitative American over the status of an entire imploding nation. This is not something we’re supposed to think about when watching this jingoistic thriller, in this country or elsewhere.
The ultimate irony in Dowdle’s film is that the Dwyers’ only hope for safety is to cross the border into Vietnam, of all places — a nation even more destroyed and then exploited by U.S. intervention. It’s safe to say this irony is lost on the makers of No Escape.
NO ESCAPE. Director: John Erick Dowdle; Cast: Owen Wilson, Lake Bell, Pierce Brosnan; Distributor: The Weinstein Company; Rating: R; Opens: Today at most area theaters