MOVIE – What do you do when your peaceful home, and country is suddenly torn apart due to a civil war? What do you do when all of South-East Asia’s citizens are hunting for you because you came from a different country? Where do you start searching for your daughter, and your wife, running in alleys, small squares, and dead ends, from the rebels, and their weapons? If you ever find yourself in a situation like this, we can do anything, just do not ask Owen Wilson for advice!

 

Although we have seen Owen Wilson trying to break out from his comedic routine, yet besides two movies that bombed he was not able to throw that mask away. If his name pops up, I’ll have Shanghai Knights with Jackie Chan in front of me, or his roles with Ben Stiller, and Vince Vaughn. These are all comedy movies. There was only one movie that Wilson was able to breakout from the comedy role, which was the 2001 Behind Enemy Lines, which was a really average movie.

In the said production he plays the soldier dropped behind enemy line pretty good. A lone soldier forced to face the enemy alone, if he wished to get home. Besides this, there were other movies of course such as The Curse (a horror movie), but none of them were as good as his comedy movies. There are actors who are only good at one type of movie genre, however there are those who try to breakout of the cycle but end up doing worse. Owen Wilson is such an actor.

Dallas strike

Owen was born in 1968 in Dallas, his name is mostly recognized from comedy movies. Most of you however probably do not know that he got a Oscar nomination as a script writer for The Royal Tenembaums. During his career he had experienced a lot of different movies, and characters, but none of those were good enough, unlike his comedic roles where he was able to act the hell out of scenes. After multiple tries to break away from the comedy stigma, but It did not really work, as the audience only knew Owen as the comedic type.

For the past few years it seemed that Owen has accepted this, but with his newest production he tries to prove to the world that he will not give up, even if the whole world laughs at him (and not because he is funny). No Escape seems like another midlife crisis movie, who may end up joining the Expendables team as maybe Sprinter, the running sniper.

Blonde Liam Neeson

According to the story Jack Dwyer, moves in to his new home with his family to Laos. Unfortunately the country goes to hell, and the rebels start killing all of the foreigners (To be honest blonde hair, white skin, and blue eyes is like an advert in Harlem). All the while he is trying to escape the warzone with his family, but unfortunately they get separated from each other. The chase is on for Jack, as he has to save his family from the warzone, and leave the country, or else the rebels will kill all of them.

And cut!

That is pretty much the story, it is little, yet tells a lot. I can imagine the situation where John Eric Dowdle, and Drew Dowdle think about the complexity of the script. Probably went like this:

John: So if he’s there, what should he do?
Drew: RUN! That did work for Tom Cruise didn’t it?

That’s pretty much all the effort from the writers, so Owen did not really have a hard time acting a man who has to get from point A to B while having really stupid dialogues to get his family back. The entire movie feels like if it was the fifteenth sequel to Taken, only Liam Neeson could not be “rented out” because he would have been unable to deal with the stress of having someone taken from him again.

How was his blondness?

One of the biggest weapons for tension was used in the 80s Batman movies, which was almost like a death sentence for those that were eating. Although the eyes were dry, the dinner acting up in the stomach at times ended up on the theatre floor. The issue was not with the visuals but that shaking the picture can result in someone – to put it bluntly – puking. A lot of directors since then have realized that this is not a good weapon, as while it does create tension in the human brain, it messes up the stomach even more.

Although there is no “Batman-seizure” so to speak, but the picture can jump around in a way that can result in a bit of nausea, and other symptoms. The huge rush results in the actor barely getting proper screen time, and you would not have noticed him if IMDB have not listed Owen as the main actor.

-Kese-