Usually late August is sort of a dumping ground for Hollywood to unload their summer movie wares that would not have made the cut during the crowded warmer cinematic season. That is why above all else, the Owen Wilson starring No Escape is an utter sizzling surprise.
Wilson is Jack Dwyer and he and his wife Annie (Lake Bell) find themselves out of economic options in America and find themselves on the way to Southeast Asia where Jack has taken a job with an American water company expanding their global reach. Unbeknownst to them, a revolution is about to start, and much of the ire will be directed at Americans due to their meddling in the country’s infrastructure and handicapping their economic future.
Upon landing at the local airport, their car service is nowhere to be found, so Pierce Brosnan’s Hammond offers them a ride to the ex-pat hotel where they are all will call home. Morning comes and there is still no word from Wilson’s company. He heads out into the area looking for a newspaper and immediately finds himself in the crossfire of a clash between rebels and government forces. Somehow he finds his way back to the hotel, which is now surrounded by rebels seeking Americans to pay the ultimate price for their involvement in destabilizing their homeland.
Wilson finds his way to his family and for a day that they thought would simply involve swimming in the hotel pool, they will be holding their breath in a whole another way as they try to find a way out of the country to safety.
John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle penned the thrilling script and John tackles directing duties. The brothers do an incredible job at moving the story along at breathtaking speed and never getting bogged down in useless side storylines. There is just enough told in the intro and throughout the peril to let the audience know why all Americans would be so targeted for death and why the Dwyer family would be such especially marked souls for extermination.
Although some may feel that this film is a bit on the ethnocentric side, The Movie Mensch could not disagree more. These people have enormous reasons for hating Americans and our heroic family are simply a senseless causality of international economic and political winds that sometimes violently shift on a moment’s notice.
The Dowdle brothers previously gave us the found footage thriller As Above So Below and it’s nice to see them tackle a straight narrative that doesn’t ever find itself getting to preachy. No Escape is simply a full throttle family in peril thriller that stops long enough to give us emotional ebbs and flows that tells us enough about this family at the center of a violent revolutionary hurricane to truly care about whether they survive the horror or not.
The biggest surprise of all in this late summer wonder is how impeccably cast Wilson is as the patriarch trying to save his family. His “aw-shucks” demeanor that normally works so well for him in comedies, plays perfectly for a person thrown into a firestorm of terror. Wilson is the reluctant action hero that is in many ways a reactionary action hero. Action happens to him and his family, and he reacts. That captures No Escape in a nutshell. It’s the kind of film that asks you to just grab a bucket of popcorn and prepare to be swept away for a breathtaking ride.
Grade: B