Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: The second best chase movie of the year.  Lots of good suspense and action.

Every chase movie ever made from this point on will have to be compared to “Mad Max: Fury Road” which is a chase masterpiece.  “No Escape” is no “Fury Road” but it is still a worth while movie.  The premise is an interesting one.  Jack Dwyer (Owen Wilson) and his family relocate to Unnamed Asian Country for Jack’s job and happen to arrive just as a coup erupts.  The coup is in reaction to corporate malfeasance of Jack’s company which makes Jack and the other expatriates target number one for the angry mob’s wrath.  The Dwyers must thus escape from the angry mob to safety.

What makes “No Escape” a bit different than most chase movies is the Dwyers have two small children who they must cart around.  Yes, the children are used mostly as props, but they are used very effectively and believably as props.  There is one scene in particular where Jack must throw his children across a chasm between two buildings that is heart-in-your-throat chilling.

The one major failing of “No Escape” is its use of Hammond (Pierce Brosnan), an obvious intelligence officer of some sort who ends up helping the Dwyers escape because he helped Jack’s company infiltrate the country thus causing the conditions for the coup.  Hammond is actually a good character story wise until he explains that he’s helping the Dwyers because he feels guilty and wants to correct a wrong when it could have totally worked to say that he was just doing his job of making sure that people under his protection safely made their way out.  And it certainly would have made it possible for them to skip the most roll-your-eyes moment of the movie which kind of ruined the end.

Despite its imperfections, “No Escape” is a fun movie and brings its own unique spin to the genre.  It’s certainly worth a lazy couch day watching.