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No Way Out Movie Review

No Way Out is a 1987 political thriller film directed by Robert Donaldson and starring Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman. It is a dated, overly silly movie.

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“He shot himself!“

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Navy officer Tom Farrell is to report to the secretary of defense, David Brice, at the Pentagon. But, his brief affair with Susan Atwell, Brice’s mistress, lands him in a soup when she is found dead. This movie garnered great reviews back when it was released, but I would counter that it did not age well and that it’s only serviceable.

My main issue with this film is its utter lack of logic. That final twist is the kind of Shyamalan twist that changes the entire movie, but for the worse. It made the rest of it make no sense whatsoever. When a twist is introduced, it shouldn’t disrupt the previously established narrative and make it incoherent, and unfortunately this is exactly what happened here.

Kevin Costner is excellent in the main role and this is the movie that brought him fame in the first place. He is excellent and quite charismatic, but the character did not work for me as he was weakly developed and again the twist about him was senseless. Gene Hackman is also solid, but the whole gay subplot was not well written. It was quite homophobic and dated in fact.

No Way Out is very well acted across the board. Each performer was memorable here. But the characterization was so slight that these actors all deserved better. The pacing is also rather slow for a thriller film, though a couple of sequences are reliably intense and thrilling.

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The politics also did not appeal to me. It is your standard American movie that features an obsession with Russian spies, and it just felt dated in that regard. Again, for the time when it was released, I can see why it was respected, but watching it nowadays, it did not age well at all.