No Escape (15.)
Directed by John Erick Dowdle.
Starring Owen Wilson, Lake Bell, Sterling Jerins, Claire Geare and Pierce Brosnan. 103 mins
No Escape is a Hollywood action picture that takes a long hard honest look at the reality of America's dealings with the rest of the world, and then halfway through flips back to the fantasy of its place in the world. It starts with Owen Wilson flying his family (wife Bell and two daughters) to a new life in an unidentified south eastern country (an approximation of Thailand, Myanar Cambodia) only to find that he's headed straight into a huge flock of pigeons flying home to roost. They arrive expecting an exciting chance to start again with his engineering job at a water plant and find themselves, the first morning they arrive, in the middle of a coup where westerners, and plenty of locals, are being butchered by machete welding mobs.
The brothers Dowdle (director John Erick and co-screenwriter Drew) come from a horror background. Their film Quarantine is genuinely terrifying. Granted some Spanish people had made it first and called it [Rec] but it was still remade with considerable skill and the first half of No Escape is blindingly well done. The abrupt way Wilson and his family, already disorientated at arriving in a strange new way of life, are suddenly thrown into a terrifying life or death struggle is captured with hideous reality. They put you right into the dramatic collapse of societal norms that means within minutes of being infuriated that the TV isn't working, you are running for your life. The sequence where the hotel is attacked and ransacked has the intensity of a zombie movie, that dramatic affront to civilized values as all you knew and assumed is turned upside down.
Dowdle's technique is impressive and impressively unshowy. He uses tracking shots, shaky came slow mo, handheld, whatever best suits the scenes and for half the picture he's flying.
It all goes wrong at the midway point in what we call The Improbable Rooftop Incident. I won't say what exactly this is because it's too far into the film but lets say it involves Wilson reacting to a nightmarish situation with a moment of resolve and resourcefulness that is beyond the everyday person. He doesn't become Rambo but it is sequence which contains of chorus of bells, all ringing untruths on many different levels: character, situation and probability. And in this sequence all the cold sweat that the film has previously generated is brushed from your brow. Because you know that although many lives will still be lost and terribly hardship will be suffered, this American family unit will remain inviolate.
I'm sure the film will be condemned as a racist fantasy – the rebels are presented as hate crazed killers, while all the audience's emotions are piled onto the white American family's survival, the American family who when crisis presents itself suddenly dig up insurmountable levels of cunning and resources, and are made unbeatable by the purity of their survival urge. And maybe it is, but it is an impeccable liberal racist fantasy, with Brosnan, playing a shady Brit ex-pat with an unclassifiable accent, delivering a speech about how exploitative western governments are all to blame for this.
Directed by John Erick Dowdle.
Starring Owen Wilson, Lake Bell, Sterling Jerins, Claire Geare and Pierce Brosnan. 103 mins
No Escape is a Hollywood action picture that takes a long hard honest look at the reality of America's dealings with the rest of the world, and then halfway through flips back to the fantasy of its place in the world. It starts with Owen Wilson flying his family (wife Bell and two daughters) to a new life in an unidentified south eastern country (an approximation of Thailand, Myanar Cambodia) only to find that he's headed straight into a huge flock of pigeons flying home to roost. They arrive expecting an exciting chance to start again with his engineering job at a water plant and find themselves, the first morning they arrive, in the middle of a coup where westerners, and plenty of locals, are being butchered by machete welding mobs.
The brothers Dowdle (director John Erick and co-screenwriter Drew) come from a horror background. Their film Quarantine is genuinely terrifying. Granted some Spanish people had made it first and called it [Rec] but it was still remade with considerable skill and the first half of No Escape is blindingly well done. The abrupt way Wilson and his family, already disorientated at arriving in a strange new way of life, are suddenly thrown into a terrifying life or death struggle is captured with hideous reality. They put you right into the dramatic collapse of societal norms that means within minutes of being infuriated that the TV isn't working, you are running for your life. The sequence where the hotel is attacked and ransacked has the intensity of a zombie movie, that dramatic affront to civilized values as all you knew and assumed is turned upside down.
Dowdle's technique is impressive and impressively unshowy. He uses tracking shots, shaky came slow mo, handheld, whatever best suits the scenes and for half the picture he's flying.
It all goes wrong at the midway point in what we call The Improbable Rooftop Incident. I won't say what exactly this is because it's too far into the film but lets say it involves Wilson reacting to a nightmarish situation with a moment of resolve and resourcefulness that is beyond the everyday person. He doesn't become Rambo but it is sequence which contains of chorus of bells, all ringing untruths on many different levels: character, situation and probability. And in this sequence all the cold sweat that the film has previously generated is brushed from your brow. Because you know that although many lives will still be lost and terribly hardship will be suffered, this American family unit will remain inviolate.
I'm sure the film will be condemned as a racist fantasy – the rebels are presented as hate crazed killers, while all the audience's emotions are piled onto the white American family's survival, the American family who when crisis presents itself suddenly dig up insurmountable levels of cunning and resources, and are made unbeatable by the purity of their survival urge. And maybe it is, but it is an impeccable liberal racist fantasy, with Brosnan, playing a shady Brit ex-pat with an unclassifiable accent, delivering a speech about how exploitative western governments are all to blame for this.
