Review of No Way Out (1987) by Marty H — 02 Apr 2013

It took about 40 minutes to get good. The musical score was godawful, typical of the eighties. After suffering through the opening titles and the music, you are introduced to Commander Farrell, Costner, who walks around tall and proud getting away with everything because of his reputation, but mainly his good looks. The small fragment sentences that he speaks sound like they are recited straight from a script at a high school play, lacking emotion and any kind of passion.

During those first 40 minutes, Director Donaldson gets you acquainted with the blossoming romance between Costner and Sean Young as they hold hands in the park, sail on a boat, and tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum together. Those scenes along with the atrocious musical score associated with them is almost enough to give up on the film. Hackman's presence usually keeps people watching, but in this film, he plays a very weak and timid U.S. Secretary of Defense who ducks and dodges questions and essentially does nothing because he has just won an election. Therefore, in the movie, Hackman does nothing until a fit of jealous rage takes the life of Sean Young. It wasn't until this tragedy occurred that the story got good and dramatic. I paid close attention to Costner for any signs of "acting life" as he was assigned his new job to investigate the death of his deceased love and I was actually impressed. He handled the pressure of the scenes that followed well and actually created some intense scenes with the help of Will Patton who played the closet gay, right-hand man to Hackman.

I don't like seeing spin offs or remakes of films before I have seen the original. I especially prefer to not write about them before I see the original. I realize that this movie helped propel the career of Kevin Costner, or at least helped establish him as a sex symbol for ladies everywhere, but acting wise, I would say he was more bad than good here. The twist in the end was not believable and again, it revealed Costner's deficiencies. For a twist like that to work, you need a lead who is going to hauntingly convince you that he is a spy at that moment. Speaking 5 lines of bad Russian was not enough to do that for me. You need direction throughout the entire film to make the viewer think twice about every line that he said and question each motive behind every move. This sort of twist is supposed to make you want to play the movie back. This was not accomplished by Costner or Donaldson. I won't be watching this again anytime soon and this won't make my list of top espionage movies.

2/5.