8. No Escape Is Labelled "Xenophobic" By Pretty Much Everyone
No Escape is a movie starring a serious Owen Wilson as a middle-aged husband and father who moves his family to "a Southeast Asian country." The day after he arrives, though, this unnamed destination - it could be Thailand or Cambodia or Vietnam or none of those countries - divulges into civil war, and so Wilson is forced to defend his family against an endless flurry of crazed, bloody-thirsty Asian people who want to murder him. No Escape's inherent premise sets the movie up as a target for cries of "Xenophobia!", of course, because it decides that it's not important to name the actual setting, lazily lumping several countries together instead. Or does it? One could certainly argue that No Escape is just an old-fashioned thriller set in a foreign land, and that the name of the country was undisclosed in order to avoid it having a true political angle. There's a POV on both sides. Still, most critics went for the "No Escape is super racist" approach. Stephanie Merry of the Washington Post wrote that "every Asian character is either a ruthless murderer or anonymous collateral damage," whilst Richard James Havis of South China Morning Post settled that No Escape "harks back to a time when Asians were commonly depicted as the evil yellow peril." The directors, Drew and John Erick Dowdle, disagree on the matter.
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
