No Escape (1994)

Posted on Jul 17, 2002 under Action-suspense, Sci-fi |

Directed by Martin Campbell
Written by Martin Gaylin and Joel Gross, based on the novel The Penal Colony by Richard Herley
Starring
- Ray Liotta
- Lance Henriksen
- Stuart Wilson
- Kevin Dillon
- Michael Lerner
Produced by Gale Ann Hurd

In buzzing around the Internet, I find that I probably have a higher opinion of this movie than most “real” (i.e., “paid for their opinions”) reviewers. Well, that’s never bothered me before, and it won’t bother me now. (Down with the suborned voices of the corporate hegemony! Power to the people! This shall be my mantra until someone decides to pay me for my opinions!) I’ll readily admit that it’s a somewhat corny movie, and makes no claims to originality, but it still manages to hold things together, and doesn’t wear out its welcome despite a full two-hour running time.

“Barbecues inside the prison building are strictly prohibited!”

In the early 21st-century, when prisons are “big business” (and they are — hey! how prophetic!), decorated Captain Robbins (Ray Liotta) gets sent to the Big House for plugging his commanding officer on the parade ground. (It’s a pretty nifty opening image, all the soldiers marching past a static camera until one breaks formation and blows out some brass brains, although you have to wonder, with all the other soldiers who just keep marching in lockstep past the spectacle, if basic training is just a little too rigorous.) Actually, he gets sent to several big houses; we catch up with him as he’s being sent to the isolated Leviticus Penitentiary, a “level 6″ installation, after having escaped from two “level 5″ setups. Thus, as is standard, the Warden (Michael Lerner) makes it a point to establish his alpha male status with the prisoner. (If you’re starting to recognize that this movie owes quite a bit to the previous year’s Fortress, well, I’d have to agree with you.) This includes appointing Robbins to “displine,” via electro-shock torture, his cellmate who committed the crime of hoarding food. As is also usual, the Warden is so intent on proving his superiority over the prisoner that he manages to make himself vulnerable, allowing Robbins to threaten his life and make him look like an ass.

In retaliation, Robbins is covertly transferred to the location secretly whispered about among the prisoners: Absalom, a tropical island prison. Summarily dumped off a chopper in the jungle, Robbins runs into the native, um, wildlife: 600 knucle-scraping fellow-prisoners who’ve taken up residence in the decrepit and overgrown resort hotel on the island, living like scavengers and basically being as rude, crude, and stinky as you’d expect this kind of perpetual sausage party to be. (I have to say, the costumes here were a fanboy’s delight: It’s as if the costume designer were given an actual hotel and its contents and told, “Make me as many Road Warrior suits as you can out of what you find on the premises.”) Lording over them all is Marek (Stuart Wilson), playing the charismatically-cruel leader with that jovially-insane kind of charm that we expect from people in his position (sort of as if Jack Nicholson were playing Khan Noonian Singh, by way of Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham). You can tell he’s a natural leader because a) he’s got all of his own white teeth, b) his face is clean, and c) his hair is in a delicately-coiffed-yet-barbaric arrangement. (He’s also got three rods pierced through the bridge of his nose — a great little symbol of his barbarism, to be sure, but considering how annoying I find even a smudge on the inside of my sunglasses, I’m surprised Marek can even shoot straight.)

“I’m keeping my cache of Close-Up in a secret location.”

Given a kill-or-be-killed introduction to the mob — which Robbins, thanks to his special forces training, wins in roughly 2.7 seconds — Robbins instead grabs Marek’s super-futuristic gun, the only one of its kind on the island (don’t ask how it got there), and makes for the hills. Despite the fact that most of Marek’s goons have few braincells than intact teeth, he ends up getting shot, bruised, cut, and finally sent off a cliff into a lagoon…

…From which he is pulled by Hawkins (Ernie Hudson), chief of security for the rival tribe. Only this isn’t just another of the same; calling themselves the “Insiders” (and the others the “Outsiders,” natch), this meagre group of 98 souls has managed to build themselves a functional-if-medieval village, growing and harvesting instead of scavenging, maintaining their humanity and dignity under the tutelage and inspiration of their leader, the beatific Father (Lance Henriksen), a surgeon convicted of the murder of his philandering wife, now wearing Laurence Luckinbill’s castoffs from Star Trek 5. It’s a nice little community, and Robbins is invited to stay and join, but he’s got major issues with joining and following orders these days, so he plans to stay only until healed up. (Not surprising, consider that the Warden mentioned that Robbins has, get this, a genetically-determined “pathological aversion to authority” — which kind of makes you wonder how he became such a highly-decorated and trained career officer, doesn’t it?)

“Trust me. I’m a good guy this time.”

Robbins meets a host of colorful personalities in the village — the mechanical guru Dysart (Jack Shepherd), the de facto doctor King (Ian McNeice), the one-armed moonshiner, the sea-shore scavenger Stephano (Kevin J. O’Connor, who provides us with a site gag when he offers Robbins a drifted-in baseball glove and asks, “You a ballplayer?”), and the terminally out-of-place kid Casey (Kevin Dillon)… all of which really had me wondering what the criteria were for being dumped on Absolom. I mean, the pukes under Marek’s command are the proto-human Neanderthals one would expect to be labelled “irredeemable” and best suited for living like scabby pirates. (I probably shouldn’t read to much into the fact that this was shot in Australia, should I?) But most of the denizens of the village seem way too soft to have ended up here. Granted, the Father’s got that murder conviction, and Dysart built a bomb in his youth that killed fifty people, and Casey was the driver and gopher for an infamous child kidnapping incident, but they still mostly seem like minimum security people. I mean, Robbins was a military man who publicly executed his commanding officer, broke out of two facilities, and physically accosted the Warden in a third before being sent to the island; what comparable level of offense could, say, a fastidious butterball like King have given for the privilege of a one-way ticket?

Anyway. Robbins’ only thought is to get off the island, which is a doubly doubtful proposition: in addition to it being, you know, a prison and all, it also happens to be highly illegal, and the Warden’s using satellite surveillance and on-call armed choppers to make sure that there’s no way for word of his private playground to get out to the public. (Not, I think, that it would make much difference. Robbins iced his CO to expose a covered-up massacre of an unarmed Third World village by Robins’ platoon, and even after he painted the parade grounds with an officer’s brains, he still couldn’t get anyone to ask questions. And since the idea of dumping all those “animals” on an island and letting them do the job on each other has rolled trippingly from the tongue of many a civilian, I don’t think that the level of public involvement would be half that of, say, the continuing Britney/Justin breakup fallout.) But continuing strife with the Outsiders keeps him embroiled in the local politics.

Robbins, feeling the weight of a) the world on his shoulders, and b) the makeup on his eyes.

It turns out, naturally, that the Father’s men have been working on secret projects to get a small contingent of men off the island, all of which keep getting blown up by the Warden’s choppers. They’ve actually managed to acquire a V8 engine (don’t tell me THAT just washed up on shore), missing just a distributor to get it running — which, coincidentally, Robbins remembers having seen in Marek’s resort paradise. Sure, it’s a suicide mission to go back there for it — but Robbins is the only man to have ever fallen into the Outsiders’ clutches and lived to tell about it, so he’s got better odds than your average bear.

Given the setup, I’m sure you can guess that huge chunks of the movie are devoted to violence, both one-on-one and full-scale assaults (as when the Outsiders interrupt the village’s Christmas festivities). It’s nicely-staged, though unremarkable, mayhem. What gives this movie the little bit of extra oomph is all of the pontificating on guilt, redemption, and self-forgiveness, and upon the responsibilities of community and the greater good. The Father manages to spread bits of wisdom like, “We’re all guilty in someone’s eyes, especially our own.” There’s a sense that many of the Insiders consider Absolom a clean slate, and some aren’t as anxious to get off the island, where their guilt is still waiting for them. (If I wanted to, I could probably make a big deal about Robbins’ leap from the cliff into the lagoon as some sort of baptism/rebirth image — but that’s probably just my brain operating on not enough sleep and too much Mountain Dew again.) Ray Liotta’s perfect for his role, as his main selling point has always been his boyish good looks, which wear the signs of age uncomfortably; its the perfect demeanor for a man whose internalized demons have left him feeling unredeemable and permanently emotionally drained. In other words, the role rarely demands that he do more than look straight ahead expressionlessly, which he’s admirably suited to do.

It is SO hard to be a serious competitor in the “Absolom’s Ugliest Dude” contest.

Granted, not a whit of this is original, but by the same token, it’s not lifted directly from other sources in huge, discrete chunks; instead, it’s drawn from a background admixture of post-apocalyptic and prison movie tropes and themes, distilled smoothly from the gestalt blend. There’s enough budget to keep the production from looking impoverished, letting the size and scope of the village in particular truly represent the accomplishments of its inhabitants over the last thirteen years.

In other words, it’s not a movie I can defend as being “great,” but will heartily go to bat for as “not too shabby.”