Literally Speaking: No Way Out
No Way Out starts with Lieutenant Commander Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner) being questioned, by whom and about what isn’t really clear. The film then jumps back three months and starts to fill in the details. We see Farrell fall for Susan Atwell (Sean Young) with Atwell equally besotted with him, problem is she also happens to be the mistress of Defense Secretary David Brice (Gene Hackman). This isn’t too big a problem initially, as Farrell is posted overseas, but when he’s called back to Washington by old friend Scott Pritchard (Will Patton) to work for Brice, a love triangle develops. Farrell isn’t too happy when he learns Brice is his competition, while Brice is not pleased when he discovers that all his generosity hasn’t bought Atwell’s fidelity. He’s so unhappy in fact that he gets a bit rough and accidently kills the girl. Cue Brice’s Mr Fix-it, Pritchard, who comes up with a clever plan to blame the murder on her lover (who they don’t know the identity of), frame him as a Russian spy and send…can you guess? Yep Farrell is assigned the job of hunting himself.
For the first forty minutes No Way Out is a love story, and a typically ‘80s one, with syrupy pop songs accompanying the sex/love scenes while a synthesiser score, by Maurice Jarre trying to sound like son Jean-Michel, fills in the gaps. With the death of Atwell though it becomes a Hitchcockian wrong-man style thriller, albeit one that really wishes it was a serous political thriller instead. Director Roger Donaldson keeps things moving along, sticking in a couple of chase sequences when the story starts to get bogged down, but he’s hampered early on by his actors.
