To save his kids from homicidal maniacs, Jack (Owen Wilson?!) throws each of his daughters from the roof of one building into the arms of his wife, Annie (Lake Bell, unfortunately for her), on the roof of a building that has to be 10 feet away. Again: This man, a relatively scrawny engineer with no presumed experience with shot put or any related sport, throws his daughters across a 10-foot gap. In slow motion.
Because the brutal, improbable “No Escape,” a barely written action-thriller about an American family hunted by faceless dudes with machetes in a never-identified Southeast Asian country—if your movie is set in a continent with countries, which is every movie pending a sudden influx of Antarctica-based office comedies, don’t act like it doesn’t matter where events are happening—is another chance for an unlucky traveler to become Superdad. It’s not really like “Taken,” though, despite Owen Wilson and Liam Neeson having the same number of letters in their names (Coincidence? Yes.) and Pierce Brosnan, who sometimes seems like the more refined Liam Neeson of a slightly goofier parallel universe, co-starring as a friendly Englishman who oddly neglects to warn this family away from their new home. (He also says, before going to a strip club, “Perhaps I should change into my sweatpants, let ’em know I mean business.”) “No Escape,” not to be confused with the 1994 thriller of the same name in which Ray Liotta defended himself against murderous prisoners on an island, just exploits a setting that isn’t the U.S. without much regard for anyone else’s life, awkwardly trying to criticize Western intrusions in the Far East while simultaneously justifying the rampage of seemingly inhuman killers and ignoring them entirely, only concerned with the impact on the white people.
Director John Erick Dowdle (who wrote the script with his brother, Drew) provides danger but not suspense and lots of gunfire but little action with technique that could be praised as “competent.” All we learn about the location is that it’s a very short canoe ride from Vietnam, and the locals’ English-speaking capabilities exist randomly, when needed in the story.
It’s not the case with a shop owner when Jack goes for a newspaper and finds himself right in the middle of an impending, deadly clash between protesters and police, which maybe he’d have known was scheduled there if the USA Today he buys wasn’t three days old. Or if he had done four seconds of research about the place where he was moving.
1 star (out of four)
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