No Way Out

No Way Out wants to be too many things: an erotic thriller, a neo-noir, a story about the lengths one will go to for love, a classic tragedy … and despite a leading couple doing everything it can, it cannot save this movie from itself. Trying to juggle all those balls is mistake #1, because it never actually juggles them. It does one thing for one act, then moves onto the next, and then the next, with no grace or fluidity. The first 30 is watching a meet cute between two shallow pill-popping young people become love/lust. The second is when the plot about her past catching up and asking him to do something he doesn’t want to do to fix it. The third act is doing it. These are hard cuts from one act to another, like a guillotine chopping the movie into parts. One minute, you’re watching unnecessarily protracted sex, the next, it’s like a one-way version of Strangers On A Train. Couple that with some cheesy dialogue and piss-poor character development that never lets us get to know these people or why we should feel anything for them or their situations, or believe that where they start and where they end up makes any sense whatsoever. And the last act twist is … umm … I don’t even know if it counts as a twist, because what is revealed isn't given anything to back it up as true, so it comes off as pointless. And the plot holes in the last act stack up at the speed of light, but the movie has no time to stop and address them, so they go by like the background of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. And then there’s the lousy filmmaking. Like montages? I lost count how many there are, but there’s at least six in the first half hour, maybe more, and another two or three later on. The direction feels like a first year film student; it wants to be artsy and stylish and just comes off annoying and dull. The score is useless at setting, underscoring, or accentuating a mood. Literally the only reason to watch this is if you like mediocre techno music or want to watch two attractive people pretend to have sex for a while before getting into a dumb story about revenge and what you'd do for love. I came in thinking this would be some kind of intelligent version of Doom Generation meets Kalifornia, or if Natural Born Killers was directed by Adrian Lyne. I left with 30 minutes of Spring Breakers - Couples Edition, and 30 minutes of a guy wringing his hands about whether or not the chick he's banging is worth murder, and 30 minutes of murder, and all of it somehow rendered as dull as dishwater.