No Escape

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: John Erick Dowdle/Starring: Owen Wilson, Lake Bell and Pierce Brosnan

It seems a new genre is slowly emerging; that of white, western families imperiled in southeast Asian natural catastrophes or political upheaval. In 2012 we saw The Impossible; a story about a white, European family struggling for their lives after a tsunami strikes the Thai coastline. Now we have director John Erick Dowdle's No Escape; a story of an American family visiting a southeast Asian country (the country is never specified, as far as I can recall), who try to flee during a violent uprising.
Though Dowdle's film has a hyper-kinetic urgency, it is also one of those films that becomes insubstantial when considered shortly thereafter. In the sobering light of day, one sees the film for what it is: an engaging but shallow thriller.

Owen Wilson plays Jack Dwyer, an American engineer in the employ of a multinational company who has come to southeast Asia to lend his expertise to a project that will help modernize the country's water system. After arriving at the airport, Jack and his wife Annie (Lake Bell) and their two daughters meet a man named Hammond (Pierce Brosnan), who takes an interest in their welfare by steering them away from shady taxi drivers. The seemingly genial Hammond then rides with the family to the hotel. We gather Hammond is some sort of businessman though what he does specifically remains nebulous.

We learn that Jack's professional woes, which include his own failed company, demand the family be itinerant, a burden Annie is keen to remind her husband about.

As Jack wanders from his hotel to find a newspaper, he visits the local markets, hoping to secure a copy of USA Today. On his way back to the hotel, he finds himself in between an armed mob and a phalanx of police men in riot gear. The mob clashes with the police while Jack struggles to escape. En route to the hotel, he sees the police have been overcome as the mob swells to army-size proportions. He also notices the mob's murderous agenda includes hacking people to death with machetes and shooting anyone unattached to the uprising. Horrified, Jack manages to reach the hotel, only to find the staff is busy trying to barricade itself against the rampaging mob. Back in his room, Jack tries to explain to his wife what is happening in the street. Jack learns his older daughter has wandered down alone to the hotel pool. Jack orders his wife and other daughter to stay in the room while he searches for his daughter. While making his way to his daughter, he sees that members of the mob have forced their way into the hotel and are conducting room by room executions. He takes a stairwell down to the pool and eventually finds his daughter though the mob spots him and gives chase. While he and his daughter make their way back, Annie hears the screams and shouts of victims the mob is hacking to death. She barricades the door until her husband arrives.

The terrifying scenes of the roving mob members have a brutal immediacy and visceral impact as well as a frightening realism.

Jack and his family find they have little choice but to seek refuge on the roof of the hotel, which they find barricaded from outside by hotel guests and staff, who have also sought shelter there. Relieved to be among fellow refugees, their sense of security is dashed when a helicopter, which they believe to be part of an evacuation effort, turns out to be manned by the members of the uprising; who begin shooting at the fleeing hotel patrons. Though the helicopter crashes while trying to maintain a hovering position, the mob finally breaks through the doors. Searching for a way off the roof, Jack finds that their only means of escape is to leap across a chasm to another roof; a frightening and highly dangerous alternative.
As the mob makes its way toward Jack's position, he and his family manage to make the leap to the other roof, though not without desperate measures.

Jack and his family play an unrelentingly tense cat and mouse game with the mob through buildings and city streets as they hatch a plan to reach the American Embassy. The harrowing journey is for naught; for they find the embassy has been overrun. The only remaining means to freedom is a highly dangerous trip down river to Vietnam, where they hope to gain asylum.

Jack learns the nature of the uprising after Hammond rescues the family from the mob's clutches--a nail-biting scene inside a garden where Annie almost sacrifices herself to save her husband. Hammond reveals his true identity as an operative for English intelligence, which comes as hardly a surprise; his motives for being in the country seemed suspicious from the start. He explains that the uprising is a response to the west's attempt to gain control of the water supply, in which espionage plays a major role. He also tells Jack his work as an engineer is merely a means to that end. The closest Hammond comes to an expression of contrition is to acknowledge that the uprising is merely the populace's way of protecting one of the country's resources from multinational corporate control, which is backed by capitalist governments. It's hard to believe that something that seems to be of paramount importance to the west wouldn't be backed to some degree by the American military.

Dowdle, who directed the creepy, 2014 horror film As Above, So Below, brings some of the same intensity to his new film. Barely a moment of rest is to be had; the suspense sustained for 103 minutes is almost exhausting. The physical and mental strain on the cast must have been tremendous. Owen Wilson and Lake Bell, who are typically comedic actors, perform admirably here in roles that demand more dramatic reach. Though his part is minimal, Brosnan shows his action movie experience as 007 hasn't gone to waste. Brosnan is quite credible as an agent in the service of unscrupulous higher powers.

But as I mentioned before, the film doesn't really add up to much. The film feels like a ride on a bullet train without breaks but its manic kineticism is meaningless, in spite of Hammond's weak and predictable revelation.

No Escape is a heady experience but one that leaves one feeling somewhat guilty for enjoying. Though it aims for a higher message, the film is really just a thriller sans intellectual gravitas. It's a jolt and a jive and that's it.

As Above, So Below

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: John Erick Dowdle/Starring: Perdita Weeks, Ben Feldman, Edwin Hodge and Francois Civil

John Erick Dowdle, Director of Devil, revisits the realm of the supernatural with As Above, So Below; a technically accomplished, better than average film with imaginative sets and camera work. Though horror is the most durable of all movie genres, it consistently leaves one with low expectations. And even though the film's trailer promised more than your garden variety horror film in terms of offbeat story and locations, it also featured many elements that left me sighing.

Perdita Weeks plays Scarlet Marlowe, Doctor of Archaeology and Symbiology though her youth leaves one wondering how she had time to collect multiple Ph.Ds'. But no matter, I wouldn't let my enjoyment of the movie become slavishly shackled to the demands of realism.

We first see her being interviewed for a documentary. The documentarian, Benji (Edwin Hodge), follows her around during the film to give us another shaky, hand-held, first-person perspective of the action--a stylistic tic that's all the rage in horror these days. Early in the film, she discusses her quest to find the mythical Philosopher's Stone; an object sought by alchemists for centuries. The Stone is thought to be key in transmuting base metals to gold and bestowing eternal life on those who possess it.

We then see Scarlet disguised in an Arab woman's headdress as she makes her way by bus to a rural Iranian village. A frantic Iranian man leads her to a hole in the wall of his home, which she enters--in spite of his protestations--to a another tunnel which brings her face to face with ancient writings. She breaks through a wall to find a black statue of a bull, whose flanks are covered with more ancient writings, which she copies feverishly. Like Indiana Jones, Dr. Marlowe--which noone ever addresses her as in the film in spite of her impressive academic credentials--seems to have little professional regard for the integrity of archaeological sites, as one will see often during the film.

After her escape from Iran, we see her again in Paris as she seeks out a former boyfriend named George (Ben Feldman), who has the ability to translate the Aramaic writings found in the Iranian cave. She explains, as Benji films, that Ben likes to break into places of archaeological interest to restore damaged or non-working mechanical objects. When she first approaches him, George is busy restoring a centuries-old chime in a church tower. That both Scarlet and George think nothing of breaking the law to achieve their respective goals again says very little about their professional ethics.

George shows little patience for Scarlet's quest but assists her in translating the Aramaic writings which reveal the location of the Philospher's Stone that supposedly rests under the Parisian catacombs. After some Da Vinci Code/Indiana Jones-like clue decipherings, the two search for a young frenchman named Papillon (No, I'm not making his name up and no, he doesn't resemble Steve McQueen); played by Francois Civil, whose singular skill in finding the hidden passages of the catacombs makes him a logical choice to join Scarlet and George in their descent deep beneath Paris.

In spite of some implausibilities, the plot's potential is clearly laid out.

To sustain the first-person camera POV, Scarlet provides each member of the expedition mini-cameras to attach to their helmets. This frees Benji from being the lone perspective--a handy solution to problems filming in dark spaces with limited lighting. This is also a clever ploy to create more tension and drama.

The descent into the catacombs is not for the claustrophobic. A scene of Benji squeezing through a hole will make even the most unclaustrophobic squirm. I'm not sure how Dowdle filmed the scenes in the tunnels and catacombs, because they look authentic and really great--a nice technical achievement for which his cinematographer Leo Hinstin can share credit.

As the group descends deeper into the catacombs, Scarlet and George decipher more clues. And while the group makes their way into the darkness, eery, creepy sounds begin to unnerve them. A horror film's use of sound can be as effective as visuals in creating dread and terror, which Dowdle employs with consummate skill.

Along the way, encounters with nightmarish wraiths, apparitions and ghouls occur with some frequency.

Everything proceeds entertainingly. I think Dowdle could have exploited the setting for more scares. And things that menace in the dark never really threaten, which saps the film of chill potential. We see a hooded something wandering around down below but we have not a clue what it is and why it mostly ignores the group, which is disappointing.

Scarlet translates an inscription above a cave opening as "Abandon all hope ye who enter here,"-- which is of course what marks the entrance to Hell in Dante's Inferno. It's a fun touch but I hoped I might see something as deliciously nether-worldish as what gushes forth from Dante's epic poem. Creepy things do abound but nothing to suggest that of the Dark Lord.

The film suggests a figurative Hell where guilt forges manacles one cannot extricate oneself from in life. The characters address their psychological troubles near the end and speedily dispost of them in an unsatisfying manner. Dowdle's script never established any of the character's psychic baggage early on, so it's a little strange for it to arise out of nowhere.

I mostly enjoyed the movie until the screenplay called for Scarlet to do something I found unforgivably preposterous. Luckily said nonsense occurs late in the film. In the end, I hoped for a darker, O. Henry-like twist but the film stubborly settles for something more banal.

As Above, So Below didn't provide me an opportunity for shredding and evisceration. It was too ambitious to deride but not enough to praise equivocally. If the quality of the writing matched the production and sound design, Dowdle's film would have been something memorable but he should be commended for his originality and for loftier ambitions seldom seen in the horror genre.

As horror films tend to steal shamelessly from one another, As Above, So Below has the decency to make its own statement on its own terms. Unfortunately, the film will fade from theaters and skulk around on DVD, which will greatly diminish its visual strengths. Dowdle is a talented director; one who thinks outside the holding cell of genre cliches. I hope the film industry doesn't beat that out of him.