The previews held some promise that this would be a good thriller, and it was, but it was kind of run-of-the-mill.
So, No Escape has Owen Wilson and Lake Bell playing a mother and father with two girls moving to an unnamed Asian country (but looks a LOT like Thailand) to work for a water company. On their way there, the country is beginning an extremely violent coup. By the time Owen and family check into their hotel, events are already in motion. The next morning, he goes to buy a newspaper and gets stuck literally on the middle of a violent street confrontation with police and protesters. He manages to get back to the hotel just in time to find a mob pulling out foreigners and killing them on sight. He quickly manages to get in the hotel, get his family, and what follows is one of the worst two days imaginable as they try to escape the country without being killed.
Now, the reviews have been savaging this film because of its extreme bloody nature, and I think this demonstrates how naïvely sheltered Americans can be. Rarely have we experienced the kind of upheavals many countries have, and even then, they tend to be very contained. Maybe it's the unflinching look at what being inside not just a riot, but a real revolution, is what critics don't understand. Maybe it's because there are two endangered children in the story? Maybe it's due to Lake Bell's attempted rape. In any case, it is harrowingly real as to the level of brutality. It is a little over-the-top as far as how murderous these guys get, especially with their own people, but recent history has given us such orgies of violence from the Khmer Rouge to Syria to El Salvador to Burma to pick your conflict in Africa. But in this case, these guys appear to be everywhere and an unstoppable force, wiping out everyone wherever they go. It struck me a tad unrealistic, but then again, I've never been in the middle of a revolution, either.
Maybe people are having such visceral reactions because they don't want to see very realistic depictions of violence in their popular entertainment. There has always been a sanitization of real violence in American movies, and this movie, for the most part, sticks to those sanitized rules, except when violence is done to other Asians. I once read a movie review (I think for Executice Decision) that said the indications a movie is racist is when the villains are interchangeable with each other, ie Asian, black, whatever with no consideration to their motivations. I would hold its rather the treatment of the victims is the yardstick. We are obviously seeing this from the disoriented view of our white family. On the other hand, the Asian victims in this film are not just meat for the grinder in increasingly horrible ways while the white family is "safe" because we Americans need a happy ending where we don't die.
The circumstances are very conventional cat-and-mouse dodging of bad guys. There is nothing particularly original about the film other than this is a typical family thrown into a chaotic situation. In any case, it is very exciting, albeit tough to watch at times. For the most part, this movie was really good outside of the omnipresent killers, and a really odd plot twist with Pierce Brosnan that is a little deus ex machina. But all in all, I really liked it.
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