Review

No Escape

Jack Dwyer (Owen Wilson) has to somehow get his wife Annie (Lake Bell) and daughters, Lucy (Sterling Jerins) and “The Beeze” (Claire Geare), out of an unnamed South Asian country that has erupted in civil war in "No Escape."
Jack Dwyer (Owen Wilson) has to somehow get his wife Annie (Lake Bell) and daughters, Lucy (Sterling Jerins) and “The Beeze” (Claire Geare), out of an unnamed South Asian country that has erupted in civil war in "No Escape."

In the past few years, a curious Internet phenomenon has emerged: the 10-hour video.

Delivered in the spirit of dada or perhaps minimalist composers like Steve Reich, these patience-testing videos typically consist of a weird or utterly banal moment cut from their original context and pasted in a loop that runs for the duration of the 10 hours. For instance, you can find a 10-hour loop of Tom Delonge's remarkably strange verse from Blink 182's "I Miss You" online. You can find 10 hours of Donald Trump insulting people (it's actually a seven-minute clip played over and over again) or of a bowed-up saxophone player honking away or of a cartoon cat with the body of a Pop-Tart flying through space to the strains of a Japanese pop song.

No Escape

68 Cast: Owen Wilson, Lake Bell, Pierce Brosnan, Sahajak Boonthanakit, Sterling Jerins, Claire Geare

Director: John Erick Dowdle

Rating: R, for strong violence including a sexual assault, and language

Running time: 103 minutes

No Escape, a kinetic movie about how inconvenient things can get for a nice family from Texas when a proletariat revolution breaks out literally beneath the windows of their luxury high-rise hotel room, is not one of these repetitive 10-hour videos. It just feels like one.

I'm not saying some people won't enjoy it, only that, like a 10-hour video, No Escape feels like it has been purposefully extended for perverse reasons. It plays like a special extended edition of its own trailer. Filmed in (and recently banned by) Thailand, it includes lots of running and jumping and throwing of children. There's whacking and stabbing and shooting. There's Owen Wilson as Jack, doing what he must do to save his family -- he has let them down before and had to drag them across the Pacific to some unnamed Southeast Asian country that shares a border with Vietnam and can't get same-day delivery of the International Herald Tribune.

Jack had to take this "middle management" job with the faceless global engineering firm because his own company went belly up, as one of his interchangeably cute daughters -- Lucy (Sterling Jerins) and The Beez (Claire Geare) -- puts it. Meanwhile, wife Annie (Lake Bell) is trying to put on a brave face, but she can't hide her disappointment at being exiled to the Country That Dare Not Speak Its Name. (Or maybe she's just wrung out from having spent 17 hours in coach.)

On the plus side, they've already made friends with Hammond (Pierce Brosnan), a scruffy boozer who tellingly wears sweat pants to a strip club (and naturally turns out to be more than he initially seems), and his sidekick Comic Relief (Sahajak Boonthanakit), who also goes by Kenny Rogers because he thinks he looks like the singer.

Anyway, they get to the hotel, find out nothing works (because, hey, it's Asia), cry in the bathroom, and in the morning incurious Jack (who apparently has no inkling about the political unrest that no doubt has been building in the country) saunters out to find a real newspaper printed in English and finds himself in the middle of an uprising. And, because he's blond and American, he becomes a target of the rebels, who seem to be summarily executing any Westerner they get their hands on, along with numerous fellow countrymen.

Worse, while Jack's new company didn't spring for a driver to pick him up from the airport, they did put his face on a welcome banner hanging in the hotel lobby. One of the mob's leaders takes to wearing the banner like a scarf -- surely the farang whose face is worthy of silk screening is a big deal.

At this point, the movie becomes one long chase, with Jack and his family running, hiding, asking, "Are you OK?" and peering tensely from behind whatever is shielding them from the sight lines of their nameless, faceless, zombielike attackers. I'll leave it to someone else to belabor the film's casual xenophobia and outright racism -- none of the Asian characters, not even the plucky Rogers, rates any semblance of humanity.

And there are two exceptionally ugly, exploitative scenes which I guess the Brothers Dowdle, the filmmakers responsible for such horror films as Quarantine, Devil and As Above, So Below, threw in to increase the tension. (Director John Erick Dowdle co-wrote it with brother Drew, who also produced.) They're hard to watch, but not because they're especially suspenseful.

If The Impossible hooked up with a drunken Run, Lola, Run while watching The Raid, they might beget a movie that looks like No Escape. It's all about the white folk trying to survive the inscrutable conditions of what we're told is the "Fourth World." Here it's the political climate that turns deadly, a tsunami of anti-Western peasants chasing after that fundamental unit of social cohesion, the nuclear American family. It's paranoid, cynical and depressing.

MovieStyle on 08/28/2015

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