Thriller 'No Escape:' 'Dad, are people trying to kill us?'

No Escape isn't going to get people singing "We Are the World" again. Nor will it do much for relations between Southeast Asia and the West, or to spur tourism to places like Cambodia and Laos.

A taut thriller about an American family touching down in an unnamed country just as a violent coup erupts, No Escape goes about its gut-churning business by playing (and preying) on our worst xenophobic tendencies. Those weird, squirmy creatures in the open-air markets. The smell of what-is-that-exactly wafting from makeshift barbecues. The chaos and confusion. The indecipherable signage. The din, the dirt, the people we can't understand. Better stay away.

But John Erick Dowdle and Drew Dowdle, sibling filmmakers who have come up through the horror pipeline (Quarantine, Devil, The Poughkeepsie Tapes), know how to push an audience's buttons. Like pranking brats who hit every floor number on an elevator, they go crazy here, putting their wholesome Everyfam through a nightmarish obstacle course.

Owen Wilson is the shambling Jack Dwyer, a water-purification techie from Texas who has dragged his wife, Annie (Lake Bell), and their two girls, (Claire Geare, Sterling Jerins) to this unidentified capital where he has a new job, and where they expect to have a new home. But when Jack leaves his hotel for a stroll the morning after arriving, he walks straight into a riot: military police and machete-wielding rebels charging each other down the street. Guns fire, buildings blaze, heads roll - literally.

He barely makes it back to his room alive. And then their hotel - the luxury hostelry where all the Westerners hole up - is under siege.

"Dad, are people trying to kill us?" little Lucy asks. Try finding a parenting handbook to address that issue.

Wilson, typically the comedy clown, the rom-com doofus, the Wes Anderson moper, proves a solid action hero: a regular guy who rises to the occasion when his wife and kids are in harm's way. Bell's Annie, too, is put to the test. Before the carnage starts, she can be seen slumped against a bathroom wall, ruefully contemplating the state of a marriage that has led her and her children to this alien corner of the globe. A short time later, as the rebels go floor to floor, door to door on the hunt for cowering guests, she will be leaping from rooftops, dodging bullets, helping Jack thwack the natives.

Pierce Brosnan, minus the debonair schtick that defined his stint as James Bond, shows up as a savvy Brit whose occupation isn't quite clear - but whose affinity for the local strip clubs is. He and his cabbie friend, who calls himself Kenny Rogers (Sahajak Boonthanakit), offer travel tips to the Dwyers on the ride in from the airport. They return to provide more vital assistance as the corpses mount.

In many ways, No Escape is like the B-movie version of 2012's The Impossible, the true-life tsunami drama in which parents Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts and their two boys run (and swim) the gauntlet of the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean disaster. In that case, it was Mother Nature as nemesis. In this case, it's human nature - politics, greed, cultural discord. In both, a husband and wife get seriously stressed out trying to save their kids and themselves as bodies, and body parts, wash all around.

Shot in the teeming Thai city of Chiang Mai, No Escape does not lack for verisimilitude. It may, however, be lacking in other departments - good taste, good sense, good feelings for humankind.

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No Escape *** (Out of four stars)

Directed by John Erick Dowdle. With Owen Wilson, Lake Bell, Sahajak Boonthanakit, Pierce Brosnan. Distributed by the Weinstein Co.

Running time: 1 hour, 43 mins.

Parent's guide: R (intense violence, profanity, adult themes).

Playing at: Area theaters.EndText

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@Steven_Rea