No Escape: a review

Watched No Escape yesterday. (Watched The Transporter Refueled ereyesterday, as more people ought to be calling it. It was okay. Certainly better than the reviews would have you believe, though I will admit that it made me yawn in places.) It was a thriller, all right. I did have gripes about a few things. First, the xenophobia that a lot of the reviews seem to be talking about is unmistakably there. Not necessarily overtly or intentionally, but they could have done more to portray the family's culture shock in a way that made it seem more like culture shock and less like: "Ewww! Gross, poverty-ridden, FOURTH-world Asian country!" (They actually described it as "fourth-world" in the movie.) I shouldn't be talking, really, since several times during the movie, during the worst of the insurrection, I was reminded unpleasantly of what Calcutta looks like every Sunday. What a sad little city... Those who call it the "City of Joy" obviously have a profound sense of irony. There can be no other explanation. Anyway, I liked the chemistry between Owen Wilson and his wife Anna. The move to this South-East Asian country (which some will be led to believe is actually Cambodia, seeing as they banned the movie based on the trailer alone) was awfully trying for her. And to make matters worse, she was afflicted with - not one, but two odious children. I had no sympathy for the children at all, and that was after I had reluctantly suspended my usual wariness of that species. Several times during the movie, I found myself saying aloud, "Stupid bitch!" Do as your dad tells you to, or you'll get everyone killed! Needless to say, she did it anyway. I was confused by the fact that Owen Wilson was carrying his elder daughter in his arms, and his younger daughter was sort of struggling to keep up with her mother. Even when she says, "My feet hurt!" no one picks her up. And the way the elder daughter constantly says, "Daddy, can you tell me the story of when I was born?" made me cringe so hard.  Children can be incredibly narcissistic, but I doubt there has ever been a soul on this planet that has been as persistently interested in the sanguinary tale of his birth as this goddamn unbelievable bitch was. In the end, when Owen Wilson finally relents and goes, "All right, you fucking punk, I'll tell you the story of your motherfucking birth," it transpires that it wasn't even a good story. Seriously, those girls were so fucking gratuitous that I would have enjoyed the movie so much more if they had been thrown off the roof at the beginning or disposed of some other way.