NO ESCAPE
A film review by Serdar Yegulalp
Copyright 1997 Serdar Yegulalp
CAPSULE: Dumb dud of an SF action epic that tries to crosbreed prison movies and far-future post-apocalypse, and fumbles both.
The title NO ESCAPE aptly describes the feelings of an audience condemned to watch the movie in question. This is the first movie I've seen that tries to crossbreed a Barton Maclaine prison picture and MAD MAX. While I could give them points for being original, those points get yanked immediately back for rampant stupidity.
It is the future. Ray Liotta plays a prisoner who has been condemned to the kind of maximum-security facility that some of my more outspokenly right-wing friends would no doubt have approved of. There, he clashes with the (predictably) sadistic warden, and winds up being sent to Absolom. Absolom is a jungle island with two major populations: The Insiders, a kind of craft-guild village led by Father (Lance Henriksen), and Marek's Men, a bunch of bloodthirsty Mad-Max-style headhunters led by -- who else? -- Marek (Stuart Wilson). A clash between the two forces is inevitable, with Liotta's character being in the midst of it all.
The movie brazenly ignores so many things it's appalling. Why were these slave labor camps built in the first place, since they aren't visibly profitable in any sense? What's all the hoopla about keeping them a secret from spy satellites? Why is it that the slave camps never seem to get much in the way of work done? And so on. It's plain there was never a moment's thought at the script level to really dealing with any of this; the movie eists as a series of action set-pieces, each only peripherally linked to the next. It's also got a monumentally huge cheat of an ending -- it doesn't conclude; it just stops dead, as if the final scenes were not filmed.
Ray Liotta is a good actor and I enjoy him in just about anything. In this movie, he's a cut above the average hunk of beefcake used by most filmmakers to absorb bullets; he can actually *act*, although the character he's given to portray is a thin and uninteresting one. Lance Henriksen looks approprately weathered and haggard (when has he *ever* looked young?), and Stuart Wilson as Marek is appropriately in-your-face and loud. But the movie doesn't care to equip these people with much to do except stumble through the contrivances of the plot.
The movie sure *looks* impressive; they spent some fairly hefty money on the set design and pyrotechnics. The producer was Gale Anne Hurd (THE TERMINATOR, ALIEN NATION), and she's been known to stand behind some fairly innovative projects that deal with the fantastic. NO ESCAPE is not one of them.
Two out of four escape pods.
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