In fact, to the extent that No Escape has anything more novel to say than “prisons are bad” – which they are, and it’s great when movies say so, but like “war is hell” it may be true but it’s also a bit of a cliché in pictures like this – it’s probably something to do with its many meditations on guilt, and what guilt should cost us.
Losing your team has weight and pain because you had time to develop attachments to this confused and scared band of kids. The game makes you care before it brings down the ax; you haven’t lost a random Joe, you lost people that mattered. It’s a tactic designed to hurt, and it works.
One is a bloody Saturday morning cartoon that barely bothers to connect its interminable fight scenes with any kind of story, the other an elegiac lament about the inadequacy of heroism in the face of death.
