Review of No Escape (2015) by Colin E — 29 Aug 2015

I only saw the trailer for this movie once, and I hardly remembered it, but I went into the theater not knowing what to expect. Watching the whole thing was definitely a shaking experience.

The first half of the movie starts out very well. A family relocates to Southeast Asia (apparently somewhere adjacent to Vietnam, but the country is never named and I'm assuming it's fictional) because the water company the father works for is expanding to Asia. Hardly a day after they move, they get caught up in a coup by an extremist group that kills foreigners on sight, which is especially unfortunate for our blond-haired protagonist.

The action scenes are very well done, and you are guaranteed to get an adrenaline rush. I have to say the cast does a fantastic job portraying emotion. One particular scene that struck me is when Jack, the father, is forced to kill one of the men hunting them lest they be discovered, all in front of his wife. Seeing her reaction as Jack strikes the man repeatedly on the head with a lamp is horrifying, and the bond between the family is really fleshed out.

The movie starts to go downhill when the family reunites with Hammond, a British agent who helped the family get to their hotel when they first arrived. After a vicious scene where the thugs attempt to rape Jack's wife in front of him, Hammond escorts the family to safety atop a building being used as a safe house. At this point, the movie's subtle bits of racism and xenophobia present throughout the first half start to steal the limelight. They eat cooked dog (I'm not kidding, out of all the animals they could have found or the butcheries they could have scavenged, they chose to eat dog in a Southeast Asian country) and discuss why the entire conflict happened in the first place.

Hammond talks about old-fashioned American corporate greed and how it enslaves third-world countries by offering services it knows the nation cannot afford and then extorting it from them later, and that this whole xenophobic uprising is just mobs and mobs of people fighting to protect their own families.

I'm sorry, but you can't set up 3/4 of a movie of an American family being mercilessly hunted down by xenophobic leaders of a coup, spend the whole movie depicting them as cold-blooded killers, and then expect to successfully portray them in a sympathetic light. I don't take issue with the rage against corporate greed, but don't use that as the only defense for a massive mob who used tanks to blow up buildings, mercilessly shot down dozens of innocent people on-screen, and were more than willing to harm children. Even better with this is that at the very end, when the family is fleeing to Vietnam via a rowboat, this entire concept gets thrown out the window as they are still hunted down by men with guns, and only by the grace of the Vietnamese soldiers (who had every legal right to shoot the family as well but let them through because the militia was preparing to attack the border) do they survive. They spend 5 minutes talking about how it's somehow all America's fault and then nothing really happens with it. If those 5 minutes were deleted, the movie would have been much better.

Of course, that's not the only issue with the movie. The representation of the natives is a bit too simplistic, and stereotypes are definitely there throughout the movie, but they are much less profound up until the dog-eating scene and the anti-America speech.

The thrills also start to lose their touch after Hammond defends the family with his own guns. The defenselessness of the family is what really helps pump up the adrenaline, but when their side gets guns, it turns into a boring shooter film.

All in all, the movie is very well crafted and it is a fantastic thriller, however the theme of the plot and the direction they take in the second half falls flat, and to many it can be outright offensive. 3 Stars.