How many foreign lives does it take to save a white American family? Thanks to the new chase-yarn, ‘No Escape,’ we now have an answer. The guiltiest of guilty pleasures, director John Erick Dowdle has expertly crafted a taut action-thriller crammed with enough white privilege to make The Donald blush.
At 34, Nancy (Londoner-accented Lake Bell) is a flakey journalist on the reluctant look for love at the pestering of friends and family. Through a case of mistaken identity hinging on a self-help book, she winds up on a date turned epic day with Jack (Simon Pegg), an online marketing manager. Charming, right? It’s this on-the-nose “charm” which will divide audiences into lovers and haters (with this viewer falling more towards the latter). In spite of a stellar cast, Man Up falls flat on its promising premise of being a rom-com for nonbelievers.
The procedural crime thriller, tales of murder investigation and corruption, a hallmark of hard boiled fiction from the 1970’s onwards, has tailed off. This is particularly frustrating when such a film emerges that should really have been a shot in the arm but was instead a bullet in the head. Step forward the hugely promising and ultimately disappointing Pride and Glory, a true Jekyll and Hyde.
Million Dollar Arm Written by Tom McCarthy Directed by Craig …
In A World… Written and directed by Lake Bell USA, …
