BEFORE: Umm, yeah, it's been a weird, crazy day. Some kind of change-related juju is in the air. First we had our repair guy - the guy who repaved our driveway and built us a new bathroom during the pandemic - at the house to do some pointing around our upstairs windows (rain got in during that huge storm a couple weeks ago) and also fix our basement ceiling, which has had a huge hole in it since a pipe burst years ago. The only reason we didn't get it fixed sooner is that that pipe burst RIGHT AFTER we had the previous hole in the same spot fixed. Anyway, these were two repair jobs that just needed to happen. Then I had my job interview via Zoom call, and I think it went well, so now I'll be waiting to hear if I get a call about a second interview - no details here because I still don't want to jinx it. Then my upstairs DVR (the one for TV shows, not movies) went down and is now constantly rebooting itself - this happens every time the cable company tries to install new system software on an old box, and it can't handle it - yet they refuse to let me opt out of updates, so I've (almost) learned to live with it. But they can't come fix it until Saturday at 7 pm, so I'm going to miss a few Thursday night shows - hopefully I can just catch them on demand this weekend. But things are definitely going sideways, in general. Maybe because it's the anniversary of the day I lost my virginity, 34 years ago? Nah, that would be pretty stupid and superstitious, right? Maybe this day just represents great changes in my life, I don't know - or I'm just looking for connections between random events.
Pierce Brosnan carries over again from "The Misfits".
THE PLOT: After moving overseas, an American family soon finds themselves caught in the middle of a coup, and they frantically look for a safe escape from an environment where foreigners are being immediately executed.
AFTER: Well, this is another one of those films that is apparently designed to make me feel good - as in, "Well, whatever else is going on in my crazy life, at least I'm not stuck in a country in Southeast Asia during a government coup." Or maybe "At least I don't have two kids and I didn't move my family halfway across the world at the worst possible time."
In this scenario, the prime minister of this (unnamed) country hires an American company to re-do the water system, but soon after this employee of that company arrives with his family, there's a government take-over or take-down, and suddenly all Americans are being killed by angry mobs. I guess somebody just didn't want clean water in this country for some reason - does this make sense? Or perhaps there's just some anti-American fervor for a (here unspecified) reason. Well, OK, I guess the mob knows best, go ahead and make your own clean water, do you even know how to do that?
The simple act of stepping out to get a newspaper puts Jack Dwyer at risk - of course he leaves his family in the hotel and walks to another neighborhood at the WORST possible time. I remember something similar happened when we went to Atlanta last year, my wife just wanted to stay in the hotel and I wanted to explore the city at night, plus I heard about this fantastic little underground cheesecake place. She thought I was crazy for wandering around an unfamiliar city at night, but I figured, I had my phone, the phone has maps, I took pictures of things along the way so I could find my way back, what's the problem? Well, I couldn't find the dessert shop, it had apparently closed, but in the underground mall where it USED to be (called "The Underground") I found a hip-hop concert and a pizza stall, and almost stumbled into a pre-Halloween event called the Masquerade which was probably a lot like that weird sex party seen in "Eyes Wide Shut". I settled for the pizza and headed back - sure I was perfectly safe at all times, but she was also right, it can be dangerous to wander around an unfamiliar city.
So the mob attacks, and Jack has to make a mad dash back to his hotel, avoid all the foreigners killing Americans and find his family again - one daughter left the room to go swimming by herself, so he's got to go find that daughter while his wife hides with the other one. They have to climb the stairs to the hotel roof, where a whole group of Americans have settled, far from the angry mob on the ground floor. But then the locals get ahold of a helicopter, and fly to the roof with guns. So you get the feeling that this is just not going to end well.
The family is forced to jump, one by one, to the next building which is several stories below, and this is probably the tensest moment in the whole film - can they each jump (or be thrown) across the wide gap? Can they each survive a drop of several stories? These are just regular people, after all, not athletes. So maybe don't watch this if you have a fear of heights, as I do. That second building is the headquarters of some kind of newspaper, and eventually the mob attacks that buildling, too. But the Dwyers are able to hide under some desks for a couple of hours until they feel it's safe enough to try to make it to the American embassy.
Uh, yeah, so bad news about the embassy, it's already been attacked by the locals and they're getting ready to blow it up, for good measure. Never leave a job half-done, I guess. But in a nearby garden the family is re-acquainted with the man they met on the flight over, who also helped them get to their hotel by bus, and who was seen doing karaoke, badly, in the hotel bar. This guy apparently knows a lot about what's going on, almost as if he helped instigate it or something - which means he's CIA or MI-6 or double-0 something, maybe. Now they need his help again to get to safety, and fortunately this guy's got a rooftop hideout, which is safe - for a little while. The new goal is to get out of the country, perhaps by floating down the river into Vietnam, which may not be a great place for Americans either, but at least there's not an active coup going on there at the moment.
There's more to the tale, but this is the basic plot - it's just "avoid the bad guys with guns" for the majority of the film. Also it's about how far parents will go to protect their children during extreme circumstances - of course anybody would want their children to be safe, but maybe not all parents would kill soldiers in a foreign country if it came down to that. The idea came from a real trip that the writers (brothers John and Drew Dowdle) took to Thailand, and right before they arrived, the prime minister was overthrown in a coup. And here's a weird coincidence, just as yesterday's film chose to remove any verbal references to Qatar, this film was shot in Thailand, but chose not to identify the country in question verbally either. They did this in order to get permission to shoot the film there - but, umm, why not just re-add the dialogue identifying the country as Thailand later, after the shoot was over?
Also starring Owen Wilson (last seen in "Sheryl"), Lake Bell (last seen in "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever"), Sterling Jerins (last seen in "Dark Places"), Claire Geare (last seen in "Inception"), Sahajak Boonthanakit (last seen in "Gold"), Tanapol Chuksrida (ditto), Thanawut Ketsaro, Chatchawan Kamonsakpitak, Jon Goldney, Barthelemy Son, Bonnie Jo Hutchison (last seen in "The Impossible"), Jay John Strifler, Vuthichard Photphurin, Manfred Ilg, Somchai Santitharangkun, Ego Mikitas.
RATING: 5 out of 10 photos of Kenny Rogers
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