No Escape *** (2015, Owen Wilson, Lake Bell, Pierce Brosnan) – Movie Review

Co-writer/director John Erick Dowdle’s No Escape is an ultra-tense, exciting white-knuckle ride. Owen Wilson is great in a straight role as the distraught, demented dad determined not to die.

Owen Wilson and Lake Bell star as American married couple Jack and Annie Dwyer and their young daughters who start a new life in their Malyasian home but soon find themselves caught in the middle of a coup. Foreigners are being immediately executed by armed rebels and they frantically look for a way to escape.

Jack must get must somehow get his family to the American Embassy with the help of a mysterious British businessman tourist (Pierce Brosnan) – an annoying country-music lover who calls himself ‘Kenny Rogers’.

Lake Bell matches Wilson for grim determination, though her role is mostly more passive than his, while Brosnan gives an eccentric character-actor turn accessing 007 that works well on its own terms but exists in a different movie from the other performances. Never mind, it’s still fun.

No Escape does suffer from the usual anti-foreigner whiff of Americans who have dared to stray abroad into the outlands and have lived (if they can) to regret it. They must pay the awful price of leaving the safety of their homeland, which is a headlong plunge into chaos and possible death, even if they are a family of obvious good will and good heart who are prepared to help foreigners. Jack has arrived in Malyasia with the good intentions of heading his water manufacturing company’s new plant there.

Nevertheless, this is still an exciting, old-style action thriller to keep audiences on the edge of their seats throughout.

Inspired by John Dowdle’s 2006 trip to Thailand, which coincided with a peaceful military coup, No Escape is the fifth collaboration between John and his writer brother Drew Dowdle.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Movie Review

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