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.

The November Man

**Spoiler Alert**
Director: Roger Donaldson/Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Luke Bracey, Olga Kurylenko and Will Patton

The problem with The November Man is that I can't recall the names of the other movies whose plots it mimics, re-works or merely robs. Strangely enough, it didn't evoke a yawn and thanks to Pierce Brosnan's magnetism, it proved to be mostly digestable.

The film resuscitates the elder-agent-trains-a-protege-who-is-one-day-asked-to-liquidate-his-father-figure/teacher-thereby-causing-angst-doubt-and-trepidation-for-the-former-student plot that has been given a workout in recent years. If that seems like one too many dashes for you, know I spared you many more.

Pierce Brosnan plays Peter Devereaux, a former CIA agent now living in Switzerland sans the occupational hazards he faced in his former life. In the film's opening scene, we watch Devereaux in action during a past operation in Montenegro which took place five years before. Devereaux's protege is the young, handsome David Mason (Luke Bracey), who is warned about getting involved with women after the callow agent shares an intimate moment with a waitress in an outdoor cafe.
Not long after, the two men are part of a task force assigned to protect an ambassador. During the Ambassador's public speech, Mason mans a sniper rifle inside a hotel room, monitoring the crowd for potential targets. When a shooter reveals himself, Mason's gunfire not only strikes his target but a small child as well. The incident casts a dark cloud of failure as a mentor on Devereaux and is supposed to serve as an harbinger of future conflict between the two men.

In present-day Switzerland, Devereaux is coerced out of retirement by a former fellow CIA colleague. His mission is to pull an agent working close to a Russian politician named Arkady Federov (Lazar Ristovski), out of the country before her identity and mission are exposed. The CIA wants information on Arkady, which concerns an incident in his past that is sure to cripple his Presidential ambitions if brought to light. The agent working close to Arkady is a woman we learn is Devereaux's ex-lover, Natalia Ulanova (Mediha Musliovic), who is also the mother of his child. Mason, who is now a veteran CIA operative, leads a mission which works at cross-purposes with Devereaux's, as he is assigned the task of eliminating Ulanova. During a high speed pursuit, Ulanova's car crashes, leaving her exposed to Mason, who picks her off with his sniper rifle. Before Devereaux can escape, Mason identifies him, which brings him to the attention of Mason's superiors at Langley.

The story shifts to Belgrade, Serbia, where a young woman named Alice, (Ukrainian actress Olga Kurylenko) who operates a refuge for former prostitutes, becomes a target of Federov. The Russian presidential-hopeful is hell-bent on eliminating everyone from his past who may know something about his nefarious, mysterious deed, including Alice. Federov's assassin, a nasty piece of work named Alexa (played with venom and malice by Amila Terzimehic) is on Alice's trail, as is Mason, who has also been assigned the task of killing Devereaux for obstructing the CIA operation in Moscow. Devereaux becomes Alice's protector from all who want her eliminated. Get all that?

We eventually learn what dark, devastating secret both the CIA, Federov and Alice are concealing. Mixed into this tangle of a plot is the cat and mouse game between Devereaux and Mason, which becomes an uninteresting narrative thread but one Donaldson must pursue obligatorily to its end.

The story holds one's interest for most of the film. Donaldson is a seasoned pro with thrillers and is able to keep the byzantine plot from bogging down in confusing details. The problem with the plot, which is supposed to be the film's narrative centerpiece; is the dual between Devereaux and Mason. Their conflict interrupts the momentum of Federov/Alice story, which is the film's plot strength. It also burdens the movie with some implausible moments, like Devereaux seeking out Mason in his apartment, where he holds a knife to his girlfriend's throat. If the scene is supposed to ratchet up the tension between the two it comes off more as a head-scratcher. Why seek out your would-be assassin and give him an opportunity to kill you to make a point that seems nebulous at best? It hobbles the narrative and creates a lapse in logic that causes the movie to stumble.

The Devereaux/Mason melee is also just not very interesting. Though Bracey learns Devereaux gave him a failing grade on a CIA trainee assessment report, we never feel he overcomes his mentor's assessment. I wish Mason were as intriguing as Alexa, whose lethal single-mindedness made her a more formidable character.

So we have a former Bond and a former Bond girl (Kurylenko) together onscreen again. Devereaux is less suave than Bond but he's just as indestructible.

The film exceeded my low expectations, but didn't budge any further than that. It was an acceptable excuse to escape a warm and steamy afternoon. It didn't lull me into REM sleep but if you ask me about the film next weekend, I may have trouble recalling any details. If pressed, I'll say I remember Brosnan, an exotic Ukrainian woman and some dull American actor as the film's co-stud. I might even remember...er...uh--wait a minute, what were we talking about?