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| “The worst thing about being a tourist is having other tourists recognize you as a tourist.” |
Hot on the heels of this
weekend’s protests against corruption in Malaysia and the Bangkok
bombing comes the opening in cinemas across the US of what is apparently a
new kind of exploitation film – the Global Slumming Thriller-Comedy.
No Escape is a
movie directed by John Erick (sic?) Dowdle and written by his brother, Drew
Dowdle. Unless their quota for using the credits “Alan and Steve Smithee” had
already been expended, we must assume that these are indeed the real names of
these unfortunate brothers, who are known mainly for B-grade horror pictures.
The film depicts the ordeal of a family of Middle American Schlubs who come for
expat work to an unnamed Southeast Asian country which looks an awful lot like
Thailand, but whose language as spoken is backcountry Lao and is
written in upside-down Khmer.
The hapless family are portrayed by the infuriating Owen
Wilson, a boiled horse and two annoying young girls who should’ve been sold to
ISIS rather than be given acting jobs. What Wilson brings to the table here is
mainly his nose, whose contours resemble the kind of reasoning necessary to
find anything in this film plausible. Pierce Lazenby makes a
series of very special appearances as a presumed Transatlantic operative named
Hammond. From this we are able to divine that the Dowdle brothers watch a lot
of Top Gear.
The story appears to unfold over less than a handful of
days. We’re never sure of the timeline, although we are told early on that
Wilson’s character and his family arrive in country seventeen hours before the
assassination of the nation’s straight-from-stock-footage quixotic leader and
the resulting revolution or coup. In fact, the working title for this film was
“The
Coup,” but we still can’t tell which is actually going on.
From the moment the Wilson character and his callow brood
arrive at their hotel, the audience gets a none-too-subtle clue that something
is amiss in the form of a total
communications blackout, but the family assumes this is normal because they
aren’t in America anymore. Mildly frustrated, Pops decides to take a stroll in
search of a copy of USA Today (we kid you not; perhaps this was the
most desperate of product placements), only to walk into a bloody
confrontation between an angry rabble of red-dickie-wearing peasants and riot
police who, despite their superior firepower, subsequently vanish from the
action. At this point, the Red Dickie Brigade start screaming bad Laotian and summarily
killing white people.
By the time Pops make it back to the hotel, the natives are
revolting inside, going from room to room and hacking more white people to
death with specially
imported Hutu machetes, and throwing Linda Hunt out of the
window. Despite all this, the family rallies up and gets to the roof, with
the help of helpful Hammond. There, they and the remaining white people learn
that the Red Dickies are very angry that the white people
took over their water company (Pops just so happens to work for the
multinational involved) so they want to kill them all. By this time the rabble
has magically taken over the military’s tanks and helicopters, using them to
finish their job on the hapless rooftop refugees. This is where the film
literally goes Full
Retard. We can’t have our heroes killed off, so they develop super powers,
literally leaping tall buildings in a handful of bounds, using their gifts of
disguise and crafty moped
acrobatics.
When they find the US Embassy massacred, even they reach
their wit’s end and helpful Hammond-Bond comes to their rescue. In between acts
of highly improbable levels of marksmanship, the Master Spook confesses to Pops
that the whole debacle is really his fault – he’s really an Economic
Hit Man who set up the whole thing the Red Dickies are so steamed about in
the first place. He tells the family their best chance is to get to Vietnam by
sailing down the river. He and his Kenny Rogers-loving sidekick Kato then die, because
despite their experience and training, they deserve to: after all, they’re
Economic Hit Men. Our American Family then use a gold watch to buy a small
rowboat to get to the Vietnamese border, which they do so in a matter of
minutes(The actual distance from Phnom Penh to the VN border via the Mekong is
about 100 KM, but who’s counting at this point?). The Vietnamese, pith
helmets and all, grant asylum to our family and we cut to a scene of them
recovering in hospital, inexplicably contemplating the miracle of birth. The
End.
No Escape is a horrifying example of Hollywood obliviosity
and xenophobia, true enough. Given recent events in the
real Southeast Asia, it couldn’t come at a worse time for people who
support a better understanding of events in the region. But for the more
cynical among us, it might serve down the line as the first Foreign Policy
Midnight Movie. After all, it’s funnier than The Room.
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