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I regret watching the film No Escape (2015). It’s a silly, stupid, racist movie, made by horror dolts. It’s also a waste of Pierce Brosnan.

As I’ve discussed once or twice – or maybe three times? Surely a normal amount of times – I’ll watch any Pierce Brosnan movie. His time as James Bond coincided with my impressionable years. Unfortunately, No Escape (2015) engages in False Brosvertising. The producers flew him to Thailand to shoot the legal minimum number of scenes necessary for a vast “...AND PIERCE BROSNAN” in their credits.

When will I learn my lesson? I should know the deal by now. Pierce Brosnan stopped starring in movies the day they handed out the Die Another Day wrap gifts. I assume the wrap gifts were leftover Madonna CDs, or a swag hat made of ice. The day that hat made his head cold/wet, everything changed. Modern Brosnan Roles are three lines, one bank transfer, and a marketing team blowing that out of proportion on posters harder than Greenland on maps.

Pierce Brosnan plays “Hammond”. That’s a distracting name choice, due to Jurassic Park. I feel like Jurassic Park owns the situation of Americans calling a British guy “Hammond” throughout his handful of scenes. It’s like how Ray Liotta owns the movie title No Escape. Did you know No Escape (1994) depicts Ray Liotta’s character getting thrown in a for-profit prison, because of a scandal around deaths in Benghazi? Somehow No Escape (1994) has more insights about life in 2015 than No Escape (2015).

No Escape (2015) is more famous than ever. It’s blowing up on Netflix AND a shameful piece of work. When I picked up the Hot Dog Tip Line red phone, you folks mentioned this film is racist. Turns out it’s racist, and in a far more cursed fashion than I thought possible. No Escape answers the question “what if somebody made Birth Of A Nation 2: Pacific Rim, by accident?” Its Asians are rage virus monsters, and are generic to the point of inhumanity. What’s extra cursed about all that is that the filmmakers didn’t mean to do that. They’re thoughtless, and only good at one thing. Their one skill is horror. No Escape is co-written by a pair of brothers who are also the director (John Erick Dowdle) and producer (Drew Dowdle). Their whole filmography leading up to No Escape was horror movies. Unfortunately, making movies about hell-gates under Paris did not train the Dowdles to make a thriller, or meet an Asian person, or google Thailand.

Why is this coup movie “a suspenseful but borderline-racist thriller”, raves The Washington Post? It’s because you cannot let the guys who made Quarantine and Quarantine 2 make this premise after that. They’ve got pent-up Quarantine 3 energy. If their next movie premise is “southeast Asian coup”, they’ll make the Asian rebels into the fast type of zombies. Is that a somewhat inappropriate choice to make, when depicting an entire foreign society? Good question! The filmmakers did not ask it. They combined their one toolset (horror) with their one premise (Asians), and Mister Magoo’d white supremacy. They also kill everybody but the protagonists with as much glee as a kid discovering Diablo games. No Escape plays it so fast and loose with foreign deaths, CNN can’t describe it without sounding like a psychopath.

On top of all that, I need you to know how boring this movie is. It’s a chore. Most racist thrillers exploit vice to achieve entertainment. No Escape (2015) has no idea what human beings want to see. It makes baffling use of almost every second of its runtime. The worst waste is the beginning. We open with a bloody coup in a palace type building in Southeast Asia. How is that presented? First there’s a long, winding tracking shot. We trail servant guys back and forth through the entire building. It takes forever. It feels like being lost in a motel, looking for the ice machine. Along the way there’s a hint that a prime minister guy is making a deal.

What is the upshot of this immersive tracking shot? Offscreen gunfire. A nameless security guy hears shots, runs back through hallways we already saw, finds the nameless prime minister guy dead.

Who are his killers? Silent guys wearing red scarves.

What does the security guy do about this? In a movie where he is a human being, he would think a little. His boss is dead. He’s dressed like a parking valet. Maybe go home or whatever? Our guy does not think. He briefly wields a knife… and then slashes his own throat with it, for no reason. We see this self-kill from behind a screen, for no reason. Then the movie title pops up in Stephen King font. Horror guys gotta horror.

The Stephen King title does that silly transition where we see the next scene through its letters as we zoom toward them. The next scene is a long haul flight across the Pacific Ocean. We meet the stars of the film: Owen Wilson, Last-Minute Replacement For Michelle Monaghan, and their two daughters. They meet Pierce Brosnan. Pierce Brosnan is so much more interesting. That’s not just me loving Pierce Brosnan. The movie makes this suburban family of four even less interesting than that sounds. The two parents complain about the length of a plane flight they chose to book. The two kids can’t find their stuffed animal under the plane seat. Then Pierce Brosnan tells the kids inappropriate stories about his scars. Scar stories! While speaking in a grimy working-class accent! An accent the actor Pierce Brosnan never nails down! Why would I watch Owen Wilson play a middle management guy for the water purification project of a multinational corporation? I want to watch Pierce Brosnan play a soldier of fortune who’s gonna teach these kids to gamble!

“Hammond” then solves all these uptight yuppies’ problems. There is not already a car waiting to take those bozos to their hotel, partly because they planned nothing beyond Owen Wilson saying “there’s supposed to be a car.” So Pierce Brosnan flags down his friend’s cab. His friend is a wacky Asian superfan of Kenny Rogers who also can’t spell that name.

On their brief cab ride, the characters see lots of government soldiers running around the streets. Pierce Brosnan squints at this meaningfully. The family gripes about luggage. We also learn this family made a permanent move, relocating from Texas to Southeast Asia, yet did not google ahead or prepare at all. Will their children attend a school? Does this country have a language? Who knows! All they’ve done is book a hotel room, and bring one appliance. The appliance is a rice cooker.

Then, the hotel room does not have a working television, or phone, or Internet. The movie spends what feels like one hundred hours establishing this. Then the adult main characters respond to these tech issues by sharing, uh, opinions.

After inventing a new racist categorization for an entire country, the characters try to sleep. Owen Wilson cannot sleep. He wanders downstairs. He finds Pierce Brosnan singing lounge karaoke. After Pierce’s set, they freestyle a nonsense prejudice.

This scene also continues a movie-long pattern of Pierce Brosnan self-describing as a sex tourist.

The next morning, Owen Wilson takes a walk to find a newspaper. This walk leads him through a popular Thai tourist destination. The movie soundtracks it like it’s Mordor. Every actor stares Owen Wilson down. The editors even Foley the sounds of fish and meat in market stalls to be extra squishy. Borderline alien.

Owen Wilson can’t find more than one English language newspaper. They only have USA Today, from a couple days ago! What kind of Fourth World hellhole is this??? Then, in an instant, the entire street shuts down and clears out for a massive battle between riot police and Scarf Rebels. Owen Wilson did not know the entire city would shift into this mode within seconds, because his White biology lacks the Magic Hive Mind Telepathy shared by all Southeast Asians.

Chaos ensues. NPCs die. Owen Wilson is both totally lost, and able to help a random woman with a baby get to safety. Then she’s murdered while he makes his way back to the hotel. Outside the hotel, a man who shouts that he is American gets executed by a Scarf Rebel mob. Then one of them turns like Michael Myers and does a Body Snatchers point-n-yell at Owen Wilson. His antennae or whatever sense it: Owen Wilson is American too!!!

More tedious stresses ensue. Owen Wilson struggles up a ladder, through a hotel meeting, and into an elevator to get to his room. Then he argues with his family who don’t believe there’s a coup despite the entire city being gunfire. Then one daughter is suddenly gone and he has to go all the way downstairs to get her out of the hotel pool. The pacing is random. The fetch quest rationales are insulting. Also Pierce Brosnan saves their lives one time, in a stairwell, in a situation it would take magic powers for him to enter or exit. Savor this moment, because Pierce Brosnan won’t reappear for 47 minutes.

On the roof, the characters wait for a helicopter. There’s a convoluted process of using two different language translations to learn what the chanting rebels below are chanting about. They are mad about Owen Wilson’s company and its water purification project. Maybe that project is NOT ALL IT SEEMS. Spoiler: they do not explain it further, other than it being Bad and American. That plotline is thinner and weaker than the water rights villain in Quantum Of Solace (2008). The filmmakers are confident it's world-changing.

A helicopter emerges … but the helicopter contains Scarf Rebels! Damn those rebels and their total devotion to a bright red signifier. They shoot everyone except for Owen Wilson’s family and one Asian guy. Then Owen Wilson’s family members spend what feels like one hour jumping across a small gap between two buildings. Because they’re too scared to do this quickly, the Asian guy dies protecting them. The family’s reaction to this sweeping carnage and heroic sacrifice is to do cute dialogue beats while taking a breather.

The family hides in a room of government employees. That backfires, and leads the rebels there. The rebels kill those employees while the family hides. The rebels leave to do more street executions, while the family focuses on their own safety. Lake Bell finds an Asian Language map. She says she cannot decipher it, to find the location of the American embassy. The camera then reveals that the embassy’s location is marked with an American flag.

Our characters proceed to do the exact stuff from a zombie movie, in order to sneak through the chaotic city and reach the embassy. They even do the zombie movie beat of moving through a shambling crowd, hoping the crowd of…infected? Please don’t tell me the storyboards or script call them “infected”. Anyway, the family pretends they are as braindead as regular Asian people.

The family reaches the American embassy. They learn Scarf Rebels stormed the embassy and slaughtered every occupant.

Then the family flees to an old guy’s garden to hide. The Scarf Rebels follow them, storm that garden, and assault that guy. Then Lake Bell tries a clever gambit of letting the rebels find her, so that Owen Wilson can steal their gun. Owen Wilson does not know how to make their gun shoot. It’s either out of bullets, or the safety’s on, and the movie doesn’t make either option interesting or feel earned. Owen Wilson gets beaten up. Then the rebels initiate the process of sexually assaulting Lake Bell while her family watches. This gets more screen time than almost every individual Asian human in No Escape. The brutal, wordless rebel leader undoes his pants and feels her up and is about to graphically do that bad thing. Then, Pierce Brosnan.

Pierce Brosnan interrupts that and solves everything and kills those rebels. He also reminds us that this movie is the story of American jerks being tormented and also still being jerks. Pierce is the only character worth saving. For example, after Pierce saves the family with his heroic mercenary gun skills, he acts like a heroic regular human. He spends one moment showing care toward Owen Wilson’s way-beyond-traumatized daughters.

I cannot understate how little those kids' parents do that. They spend the whole movie screaming or grousing or working on their relationship with each other. Meanwhile Pierce does sweet “magic necklace” lore with the kids, gets the family to a safehouse, feeds them all, and almost sells this movie’s baffling take on international espionage.

He also mentions that Vietnam is “a few miles away, down that river.” This is exciting, because Vietnam is a different country. Maybe the rage virus stops at Customs or forgot its passport. So the family and Pierce all try to go to Vietnam. Rebels interfere and fire on them. Pierce takes a bullet, can’t go on, and lets a truck run him over to cover the family’s escape. It’s pretty rad. It would be more rad if it felt less random, and if it didn’t eliminate Pierce Brosnan eighteen minutes before the credits roll.

The Pierce-less family overcomes several slow, stealthy, pointless obstacles on their way to a rowboat. Suddenly more rebels jump them, and try to force Owen Wilson’s daughter to hold a gun in her hand while they use that gun to shoot Owen Wilson in the head. This is the fifteenth or twentieth or hundredth part of the movie that would Joker-fy any child forever. The movie plays it like it’s one more ordinary index card on their script outline corkboard. Lake Bell hits that rebel guy with an oar and the family gets in a boat. Despite a terrifying rebel flashlight pointing at them, they paddle all the way under a bridge labeled “VIETNAM” in big Latin alphabet letters.

Then we achieve total emotional resolution, in the sense that the movie has money for one more location. The family hugs as they’re lifted out of the boat. They hug again a few feet away from that previous hug. Finally they lay in one hospital bed together while retelling one of the daughter’s birth stories. Owen Wilson also has one arm in a sling, because that is the care a man’s arm requires after an action movie. Roll credits.

I hope you picked up on a tone throughout this film. By “tone”, I mean the out-loud racist statements of the protagonists and the general willingness to dispose of Asian people. Even when this movie thinks it’s doing a good job, or being clever, it’s still all the bad things. Remember the wacky “Kenny Roger” cab driver? Twist: it turns out that persona is a cover for his immense intelligence and skill, and his secret work as a noble colleague of Pierce Brosnan. Double twist: the movie kills him off moments after revealing this. They don’t even bother showing him get shot. He’s in a pool of blood after the important characters dodge bullets.

This movie’s deaths are also hollow because it wants to be geopolitically apolitical. They filmed this movie in Thailand. Specifically, a tourism hot spot. It looks nice there. The location almost forces the movie to frame the locals as demonic. Otherwise everyone looks like they’re on the way to an elephant sanctuary and a massage.

Most countries want their glamorous locations to receive an Emily In Paris drop-in from the movie industry, and a glamorous role as a setting. The Thai government did not want that, because they glanced at the No Escape script.

In addition to forcing actors to speak Alt-Laotian, the movie’s sets and plot mangle stereotypes of Cambodia.

Remember the Scarf Rebels? Who massacre everyone they meet? Their scarves are red, in a nod to the name of the Khmer Rouge. For this and every other reason, Cambodia banned screenings of this movie. Thailand also threatened to ban it, to force those production changes, and also after filming, because the Wacky Khmer Text fails to hide how Thai the locations are. Apparently the movie is also ridiculous in Thailand’s political context, because red is the color of pro-democracy protests held there in 2010. And real Thai coups are so much more interesting than this movie’s coup. They’re complicated. Their latest coup might be unraveling back toward democracy. And their latest coup’s leader was a military dictator who pranked the media by setting up a cardboard cutout of himself instead of answering questions.

That photo is more engaging than the entire No Escape story. No Escape has no stories. How are its several million people anonymous? Why do its mass deaths happen for the political and economic cause of MacGuffinism? That seemingly neutral choice causes a lot of the movie’s “I guess they’re just bloodthirsty” racism. A racism the filmmakers patted themselves on the back for.

I’m amazed this movie isn’t famous, as a crime. I guess it couldn’t make a splash for its hatred because it’s too boring and clumsy as entertainment. Or maybe because there were already two movies called No Escape (1953 and 1994). Which leads me to my main note for this film, as entertainment. Pierce Brosnan and Owen Wilson should’ve swapped roles. These doofuses cast Pierce Brosnan as a loose cannon, a rueful mercenary, a representative of everything wrong with global American power. Let the rueful American loose cannon Owen Wilson play that role! He can re-use his Royal Tenenbaums cowboy hat. Then you cast Pierce Brosnan as the devoted family man with an artistic soul. It’s the role he was born to play. Someday he’ll get to do it. Or do any movie that’s not scamming an East Asian nation. And I know, I know, he does a lot of those “family man/joyful guy” acting things in the Mamma Mia franchise. Thanks for reminding me, and I’ll start the popcorn.


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Comments

CHAUGGLE

[VIOLENCE SILENCE]

Bill Culbertson

The writer and director wanted it to be about American foreign policy, but didn't seem to have anything to say except "Americans will do American things."

Mike Metzler

It sounds like Lake Bell is also wasted in this movie. She is great in Children’s Hospital.

Andrew

Between Top Gear, Grand Tour, and Jurassic Park, the last name Hammond will always and forever be associated with British blokes.

Andrew

As someone of Southeast Asian heritage, I must applaud Schmidt for recognizing and acknowledging our Magic Hive Mind Telepathy. We're just like the Spaniards in Resident Evil 4, or the Africans in Resident Evil 5.

Andrew

So many headscratching moments in this movie. Crossing the river from not-Thailand to Vietnam? The only way you can get from Thailand directly to Vietnam via a body of water is through the Gulf of Thailand, which is a fair bit bigger than the stream they're crossing. Then again, geographical accuracy has got to be the least of this film's problems. Also, totally agree with the idea that Pierce Brosnan and Owen Wilson switching their roles would have made this movie infinitely better. I think the people behind this movie were still hung up on "Pierce Brosnan = James Bond" and bent on having him be the gun-toting ex-military merc type rather than the "family man/joyful guy" he is in so many of his other movies, when he's so much more entertaining as the latter.

FancyShark

Agreed. I think she's said she doesn't get a lot of roles because she either doesn't look like a leading lady or because she hates roles like this one. If that's the case, my heart goes out to her.

Bonnybedlam

This movie feels like they wanted to make Asian Congo with Pierce Brosnan as Tim Curry and then did the exact opposite in literally every way.

sissyneck

yes give this one both barrels even Midnight Express had that real good Giorgio Moroder song i somehow kinda doubt were gonna get any j dilla tracks outta No Escape here

Swift Justice

He was the rival of a crossdressing Robin Williams in Mrs Doubtfire, barely anyone seems to remember.