No Escape

There is a core to this movie that is very good, surrounded by some bad mistakes by the filmmakers that seem to be the source of its most common and cogent criticism. This core begins with a great premise. A family, the Dwyers, have just moved someone new, somewhere foreign to them, where they don’t really know the language, culture, or customs, in order for the father to take a new job at the foreign office of an American company. This lays a lot of the groundwork for interpersonal tension: the mom and dad are not on the same page about the direction their life is taking, the kids are unhappy to have given up everything they knew, and so on. Then, the day they arrive and begin trying to figure things out, a violent coup takes place and in the ensuing chaos, the streets become sites of clashes between symbols of the old establishment (the police and military) and violent mobs of citizens looking for retributory violence against those they believe have been destroying their country, including all white foreigners. With their hotel attacked, and their appearance a liability, the family must somehow sneak, hide, run, jump, drive, and paddle their way to anywhere safe.

The result is an incredibly taut and tense thriller about isolation, survival, and family. This part of the piece works exceptionally well, in my opinion. The movie makes you feel the chaos, the panic of the family, and the lurking threat everywhere they go. Yet there is a balance to it. Like the sublime final acts of Children of Men, this film has an amazing ability to put you on the edge of your seat and never really let you relax again, but still punctuate that tension with slower, softer moments that keep it all from becoming overbearing.

There is, however, an elephant in the room when it comes to this movie. A common criticism of the movie by both professional and amateur critics alike is that it is, in a word, racist. As the Rotten Tomatoes summary explains it: its thrills are offset by its “one-dimensional characters and uncomfortably retrograde worldview.” Though there is some merit to this perspective, I think it’s perhaps a bit harsh.

Some people seem to presuppose that merely representation in the film of a violent conflict in a developing unnamed Asian country in some way implies some unique brutality to these people that reinforces a rich-nation, Western, or white centric world view. However, each element of the story is something that has happened in history. The world has had its fair share of coups or attempted coups (and not just in developing nations) and anti-Western, or at least anti-American, sentiments often accompany violent political shifts in countries with a colonial past. Argo, and the events that it was based on, are about similar dangers that affected Americans who were unlucky enough to be in Iran during the revolution of 1979, not all of whom were embassy personnel. We have even seen an actual hotel attack during Nepal’s Gen-Z protests, where a Hilton was partially burned, although no guests or staff were targeted like in this movie. So, to me, the broader strokes of the story, therefore, felt grounded in some amount of reality.

The movie does, however, make some specific choices that don’t help keep it in more neutral territory. For example, in an attempt to show some of the displeasure the family is feeling at their reassignment to this unnamed Asian country, the parents refer to it as worse than the third world, which is a fairly loaded and xenophobic perspective that leans on outdated Cold War terminology. When the movie, by the necessity of the plot, not only never counters that viewpoint but only furthers it through the proliferation of street violence, it does make the whole project seem decidedly out of touch or worse. Yes, this line is from the perspective of the characters, not necessarily the authors of the piece, but it is, I think, unnecessary to showing the discomfort of the out of place Dwyers and is one of the key moments responsible for driving the narrative that the movie is uncomfortably racial.

The movie could also have done more with propping up local characters. While the criticism that all Asian characters are presented as either bloodthirsty psychopaths or collateral damage is untrue, there is both the man who hides them in his Zen garden and the friend of Pierce Brosnan’s character, the movie does walk the line between an outsider’s story in a richly realized foreign setting and a whites rescued by other whites in a violent non-white area line very ineptly. No amount of ruminating on conspiracy theories about the dark side of the International Monetary Fund undermining developing nations will justify that.

I think part of this stems from a lack of deep thinking on the part of the script. The obvious thing, given that the conflict is one of people trying to hunt and kill other people, to structure this as a sort of man against man story. Such a story, in tradition, typically concerns a protagonist and an antagonist who play a cat and mouse game that ends in a final confrontation in the climax. But this isn’t that movie. This movie should have been a man against environment story, but instead of something like a harsh storm or unforgiving wilds it is the bloodlust of disorganized mob justice. The city itself, and the people in it, becomes the source of both danger and salvation, the same way the forest might in a different kind of survival story. We don’t need it to be the actual, literal same guy relentlessly hunting the family. It doesn’t help, and maybe even hurts, the story. How is this one person and his gang so dedicated, and so skilled, at following this one family through all this chaos? It stretches our suspension of disbelief.

Perhaps the worst decision in this area, however, is the conclusion. The culmination of my problem with the singular focus of the antagonist and his gang is a scene so full of unnecessary cruelty that it doesn’t even make sense given the base premise. If all he wanted was a retributive purging of colonialist races from the country, why would he torture someone in such a disgusting and dehumanizing way instead of just killing him like all the rest of the people that were killed? As far as I can tell, it’s because it makes a nice climax for the finale and no other reason. This level of cruelty is, I think, another key moment people think of when they think of the poor racial politics of the film.

If we ignore that the setting is generically Asian and the family is white, the movie provides a thrilling premise of survival in a foreign land where things like language and cultural barriers only add to the feelings of isolation and fear. Some may find that harder to put aside than others. I liked the film as a simple, taut thriller. I feel like it executed on that premise extremely well, especially for a movie that got so little positive attention on its initial release. I was able to buy into the peril enough I could overlook some of the silly contrivances and weak political philosophy shoehorned in by the screenwriters. But I also think that some of the criticism is discomfort more with the structure of the premise than a plain reading of the text, so take my position with the appropriate grains of salt.

Would Recommend: If you are in it for the pulse-pounding, edge-of-your-seat thrills and the rest is just window dressing.

Would Not Recommend: If you are quite sensitive about the portrayal of people and places outside Western Europe and America.