This film has been a bit unfairly dismissed by most critics, and–if you read most of the reviews–they seem caught up more in the fact that the portrayals of rioting Southeast Asians is racist than anything actually presented on camera. As an excuse to engage in identity politics, most of the reviews work, but as an actual review of the film they don’t…
What Works: …It may also help that the film actually isn’t totally unfair to the rioters. It’s not exactly “Captain Phillips” in terms of even-handedness but it’s not as if the riots have no context either. Pierce Brosnan’s character shows up to make the case for why the rebels are so hell-bent on killing the Americans–the Americans actually work for a corporation that is trying to control the local water supply or trying to control their country through infrastructure debt–and it’s not portrayed as an entirely wrong reason. [Great documentaries have been made about European utilities buying third world water companies to jack up the prices of water.] Perhaps certain reviewers fell asleep during these expository passages about the reasons for the rage, and only woke back up for the rage itself. The Asian country itself is never identified, but is it really so hard to imagine that the powerless-becoming-powerful might be filled with cathartic, murderous anger? Well it probably isn’t to anyone who’s actually spent time in the middle of a country going through a rebellion. [Read Richard Loyd Parry’s excellent “In the Time of Madness” for a snapshot of Indonesia unraveling during a coup.]
But the film’s real draw is the scenes of abject terror that follow the riots, and it is downright impossible not to be caught up in that sense of spiraling dread. The film comes as close as any I’ve seen to putting you right there for civilians caught in peril, and the middle of the movie is particularly effective at mimicking the confusion and chaos that real people probably feel when they’re in those situations. Plus, Owen Wilson and Lake Bell may not seem like the likeliest actors for these parts, but that only adds to the feeling that these are just regular people trying to survive. They do a surprisingly skillful job along with Brosnan.
What Doesn’t: Certain scenes are completely implausible, and towards the end of the film you’d be forgiven for thinking “this is the luckiest damn family in the world. They should buy lottery tickets when they get home.” The constant near-scrapes that they get out of eventually border on unlikely. And some of the effects are a lot better than others.
What I Would Have Done Differently: I kept my eyes wide-open during this movie for the perceived racism that other reviewers insisted was there, but I’m just not sure how portraying a realistic sense of rage that comes with an uprising against powerful elites—a lot of the victims are other Asian “collaborators”—in an unidentified country really qualifies. This film could just as easily have been set in the Middle East or Africa or Central America, and it’s about capturing a feeling of the world shifting out from under you more than any real agenda to make Southeast Asians look especially dangerous.