No Escape: An Exclusive Featurette from the Thriller

Oddly, it stars renowned nice guy Owen Wilson, whose gee-shucks demeanour feels at odds with the action-packed, gun-slinging genre.

Written by John Erick and Drew Dowdle.

With Lake Bell, Pierce Brosnan and Owen Wilson.

In No Escape, Owen Wilson plays Jack Dwyer, a one-time entrepreneur who has fallen on tough times and must move his family overseas to take a job with a company overseeing the construction of a new clean water project in an unnamed Southeast Asian country.

When I say “white-knuckler”, I mean that literally. Bell, similarly known for her comedic chops (“In a World …”, “Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp”), is better still in a performance whose elemental display of maternal ferocity may occasionally remind you of Naomi Watts in “The Impossible”. Not long after he arrives with his patient but anxious wife, Annie (Bell), and their young daughters Lucy (Sterling Jerins) and Beeze (Claire Geare), Jack finds himself immediately on the sidelines of a street conflict between Molotov-cocktail-wielding protestors and police officers, their riot shields marked with upside-down Cambodian letters that further frustrate any sense of the movie’s geography.

Dowdle earned his directing stripes with artless but lucrative low-budget horror shockers including Quarantine and As Above, So Below.

Since the airport would probably be among the first locations attacked and secured by the rebels, No Escape already starts out on shaky logical ground. But, eventually, Pierce Brosnan – also cannily cast as the sort of overly helpful stranger who always raises suspicions – appears to shift the blame off the revolutionary Asian characters and onto the foreign interests that have been meddling in the country’s affairs. As a man who puts his family in harm’s way yet makes up for it in fierce protectiveness and self-sacrifice, Wilson isn’t playing against type so much as against genre, and his goofball-everyman persona works well enough in this disorienting context.

Loudly telegraphing his hidden depths from the opening act, Brosnan’s slippery anti-hero gets to deliver the film’s sole political statement, a rote reflection on payback for western corporate colonialism. It should come as a surprise to no one that when the bleep hits the fan, Hammond turns out to be more than just a drunken letch who’s in town for the hookers. Jack is a loving husband and a tender father, but when backed into a corner, he will grab a rock or a handy piece of furniture and cave your skull in. They are forced to witness things you hope little kids would never be exposed to, and their portrayals help to tug at your emotions even more than the adults. Hammond’s explanation would provide sympathy and understanding for the rebels, except that they are portrayed throughout as psychopathic animals – you might as well have the Dwyers running from a swarm of zombies. “There is no escaping the fact that (Weinstein) is just throwing this out the door”.