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.
Kevin Costner and Sean Young aren’t actors renowned for their displays of emotion. Reserved, restrained, controlled are all words that could be used to describe them, although I’m sure some would just describe them as wooden. So the idea that these two performers can convince us that they fall in love at first sight is about as slim as an anorexic supermodel. It’s fair to say the film only gets interesting when Young’s character stops breathing.
Costner always strikes me as unlikely sex symbol, he’s always seemed far more suited to roles like the arrow straight Eliot Ness in The Untouchables (made the same year) than this or Bull Durham. Yet both films did very well for him at the box office so I guess he must have something that makes the fairer sex go weak at the knees. Here he get to bonk Sean Young in a limousine, show off his hairy chest, do some running about and spend most of the film with a look of sincere concern on his face.
As David Brice, Gene Hackman gets a dry run for Absolute Power, which saw him get promoted from murdering Defense Secretary to murdering President. In truth Gene has little to do, with the role of chief villain filled by Will Patton instead. He could do with taking a leaf out of Costner’s acting manual. He gives a sweaty, nervous performance that makes you wonder how he convinces Brice to go along with the cover-up in the first place.
The film gets rounded off with a twist ending that must have seemed like a fine idea, a clever way to wrong foot the audience. It certainly does that, not because it’s clever but because it makes no sense. The film as a whole relies on a large number of coincidences but the ending pushes it to breaking point.
Horror and Western film buff, Marvel comic geek, music lover and occasional gamer. 