An Owen Wilson Movie Is Blowing Up On Netflix
An unexpected Owen Wilson movie is taking off on Netflix.
This article is more than 2 years old
Netflix users have recently discovered No Escape. The Owen Wilson movie is currently the fifth most popular title on Netflix in the USA. You may hear the name Owen Wilson and assume you’re in for a comedy like Wedding Crashers, Zoolander, or Starsky & Hutch. Or, perhaps, any of the Wes Anderson movies he’s been in. However, No Escape is an odd title in Wilson’s filmography. Are you curious to see Wilson star in an action-thriller as a father desperate to save his family? Watch the trailer for this 2015 movie below.
Did you see him throw his child? Clearly, the situation became desperate. The trailer is packed with intense moments. The story sees Owen Wilson as an American businessman moving to an unnamed Southeast Asian country for a new adventure. His wife is played by Lake Bell. He makes friends, or at least has conversations, with Pierce Brosnan, who serves as a welcome guide for their family. They aren’t in the new country for long before there is a violent coup overtaking the country. People are being shot in the streets and attacked in their hotel rooms. The parents decide they just need to get to the American Embassy and everything will be okay. However, getting themselves and their young daughter there requires dodging violence and navigating foreign streets and rooftops.
No Escape actually did surprisingly well at the box office. When studios first tested it with audiences, they had to make a few adjustments. For instance, the movie was originally titled The Coup. However, audiences weren’t clear on the word “coup” and it confused the movie’s marketing. They retitled the Owen Wilson film and released it in late August 2015.
This was a less popular time at the cinema. Summer blockbusters typically come out earlier in the year. The fall run of popular films hasn’t yet begun. Some say that this is a time where a lot of movies the studios don’t believe in are released, but it does give a chance for those movies to gain momentum at the box office with less big competition going against them. This Owen Wilson movie gained a lot from that timeline. On a budget of $5 million, this movie earned $54.4 million worldwide. Those are extremely impressive returns.
Audiences have mixed reactions to this one. On IMDB, No Escape holds a 6.8 rating, which isn’t too bad at all. On Rotten Tomatoes, the action-thriller has a 47% rating, which could be a lot better. Audiences were much more favorable than critics, who were fairly brutal about this Owen Wilson movie. Roger Ebert gave it half a star. They said the movie was, “a dreadful and creepily exploitative would-be thriller, low-grade trash that it is too silly and stupid to be as offensive as it frequently comes close to being throughout.” Ouch.
Who are the people who like this one? People who like intense thrillers that border on horror stories. This probably isn’t the movie Owen Wilson fans are typically looking for. The movie was written and directed by John Erick Dowdle. His other top credits include Quarantine, a horror movie from 2008, and Waco, an intense TV mini-series.
Before 2021, we hadn’t seen Owen Wilson in a major film production in a while. No Escape released in 2015. After that, we saw him in Zoolander 2, Cars 3, and in 2017, Wonder. Just recently though he returned to the screen for Amazon’s new movie Bliss.
Another exception in Owen Wilson’s filmography, Bliss is one of his more serious roles. The movie is a drama, romance, sci-fi where he co-stars with Salma Hayek. Wilson’s character has recently undergone a divorce and been fired. Life is looking fairly bleak. Then he meets Salma Hayek, a homeless woman. She suggests that actually, the world is great. They’re just living in a simulation meant to make them think it’s terrible. Unsure of which side is true, they have to ask themselves whether truth matters. If one world is better, does it matter if it’s real? The movie released on February 5, 2021. So far, reviews for Bliss haven’t been great. Many have said Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek are lovely, but the movie is a mess.
We don’t have long to wait for the next Owen Wilson production. Did you know that he’s going to be playing Mobius in Loki for Disney+? The first of the six episodes premiere on the streaming service on June 11, 2021.
