It is impossible to comment on ‘No Escape‘, the action film made in 2015 by John Erick Dowdle and written by him with his brother Drew, without thinking about international events in the news. An American family finds itself in the worst possible place at the worst possible time – in a foreign overseas country where a change of political regime has taken place and the lives of all foreigners are in danger. Communications are no longer working, the American embassy has been evacuated or occupied by the rebels, and the family has to make its way to freedom, at all price. The chosen path, in fact the only possible one, is violent, and the result is an action film in which things happen and are resolved as in Hollywood movies, but which also has current resonances and a political substratum.
‘No Escape‘ succeeds because the screenwriters and the director have followed one of the rules that in some cases turn action movies into good cinema: they have created a gallery of characters whose fates viewers care about and can identify with, who go through credible experiences. The middle-class American couple played by Owen Wilson (in a dramatic role, very different from most of those played by the actor in other movies) and Lake Bell live with their two little girls an absolute nightmare, turning into a few hours from ordinary people living the experience of traveling to an exotic country in people running scared, fleeing murderous mobs in order to save their lives. Explicit violence and especially the use of children in the scenes where the two girls go through scaring experiences could be debatable, but director John Erick Dowdle managed in my opinion to create a perfect balance that makes the film captivating as an action film (there were scenes in which I literally sat on the edge of the chair) without slipping into manipulative extremes.
There is a third important character in the film, whose presence has a dual role – to save the American family in moments of action when everything seems lost and to make the connection between what we see on screen and the geopolitical reality of Indochina where the action is located (the film avoids naming the country exactly, and some details of the location are problematic). Pierce Brosnan‘s fans will be pleased to meet him in the role of an aging James Bond, who thinks and speaks like John le Carre’s spies. ‘No Escape‘ is a good action film, which could be considered a purely escapist movie if the subject were not so related to current events.