NO WAY OUT
Directed by Roger Donaldson
A film review by Steve Upstill
Copyright 1987 Steve Upstill
Thriller fans and those able to choke back outrage at blatant stupidity have the best chance of enjoying this film, which is blessed with some fine thriller execution and cursed with some hoary thriller cliches.
NO WAY OUT, the new thriller directed by Roger Donaldson, is a study in ambivalence. Rarely have the elements of a movie been so disparate in their potential to please. On the one hand, you won't find a better-looking or -acted movie for grownups offering as many legitimate (or illegitimate) suspense units. On the other hand, you have to suffer through some astonishingly lame turns of plot (at one point, some of the most powerful people in the US government decide it would be a keen idea to launch a room-by-room search of the Pentagon using a pair of witnesses--that's right: *two* people--to find a Soviet agent) and arguably one of the most arbitrary surprise endings on record.
Basically, the film is much, much better than it has a right to be. The script is boilerplate turnabout romantic thriller intrigue at the highest levels of power in the US government. The writing is adequate to the task. It's the execution that makes it worthwhile. The movie has as much respect for the audience's intelligence as I can recall in a major Hollywood picture in some time. In particular, the psychological interplay between the characters and the control of the tone of individual scenes is exceptionally keen. I really LIKE not having every little thing s-p-e-l-l-e-d o-u-t f-o-r m-e in words of one syllable. I have to credit the director and the fine cast (Kevin Costner, Gene Hackman, Sean Young, and others) for most of what's good here.
In short, if you can turn off your reality checker, ignore a variety of blatant stupidities, put up with several gratuitous chase scenes, and believe in the most surprising of surprise endings, NO WAY OUT will definitely give you your money's worth. But the clash of all these qualities keeps my rating down to **1/2 out of ****.
Steve Upstill
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews