"No Way Out" has the makings of these solid paranoid political conspiracy thrillers of the 70s especially when you look at the triumvirate that leads the plot: a politician, a technocrat and a naval officer, and yet it's a rather sordid story: a fake counter-espionage operation used to cover up a crapulous murder. Defense Secretary David Brice (Gene Hackman) kills in a fit of jealous rage his mistress Susan Atwell (Sean Young) and his faithful aide Scott Pritchard (Bill Patton) decides to pin it on a Mole, a Soviet agent to avoid any interference with the FBI. However, his friend Lt. Comdr. Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner) was just having the greatest idyll of his life with Susan. Behind every powerful men, there's a woman but that one didn't ask to cause all the troubles.
And because Tom loved her, we can feel his shocks when he learns that he's ironically leading the investigation about her murder, and because we knew how Scott loves his boss, he would do anything to cover for him, including a 'wag the dog' story with a phantom agent named Yuri. The plot thickens when they find a damaged polaroid picture that might reveal his identity thanks to one of these pixels enhancing programs that is acceptable as a McGuffin given that the process is revealed to be long and not 100% viable. Meanwhile, other evidence consists of a gift Bruce gave Susan and that might prove his connection to the murder. Tom knows it's his picture on the polaroid so he has no other choice than incriminating Brice before he takes the blame. He asks his friend, a wheelchair-bound computer expert Sam (George Dzundza) to stall the program and so begins a race against the clock inside the most secretive place in America: the Pentagon.
The core-plot involving the three main characters is so riveting that it's almost disappointing when the film indulges to formulaic chases like when Tom tries to save Susan's friend (Iman) from Scott's goons and it's as hard to believe that a man of Scott's intelligence wouldn't already smell something fishy about Tom's selective involvement. It does seem at times, that the film takes a few gambles with credibility and gives Tom too much luck, but then again, what saves the film is the way it allowed us to follow these characters long before the murder occurs (at the forty-minute mark approximately) and so we're truly involved. It also helps that the love story, enhanced by that steamy limousine sex scene, never seems gratuitous and Susan's total abandonment to Tom makes her death even more tragic.
There's also a case being made about Tom being hardly identifiable by his witness since he looks like an average man, and that describes Costner's appeal pretty well: he's handsome in a non-spectacular way, charismatic in a quiet way, and engaging without being too flashy, definitely a low-profile hero making Tom Farrell one of his best performances along with "Dances With Wolves" and "A Perfect World". Costner has often been unfairly described as wooden but so were many actors with an incapability to strike as unlikable, like Gregory Peck, suffering such criticism when all they played were characters trying to keep straight and dignified faces because circumstances asked for it. And that's totally Farrell's situation. This is a serious picture with serious protagonists.
Hackman is also fascinating as a politician who loses control and becomes the pawn of his own subordinate played by Patton who truly delvers as a charming, clean-cut bureaucrat but so devoted to his boss that he'd turn into the devil buying anyone's soul, his evolution from a confident boyish technocrat to a Machiavellian mastermind is almost Hitchcockian but it's all in the dynamics with the corrupt Brice that he forms a sort of two-faced villain "Rope"-style with a Costner playing both the cat and the mouse's role in the thriller. That the whole investigation is embedded in the climate of Red Scare, political sex scandals and other petty rivalries, only adds to the heated claustrophobia that increases as the film moves toward its climax that, tactfully, spares us from an action scene but provides the perfect emotional momentum after such a gripping crescendo.
And yet the story has a few more tricks under its sleeve but at that point I'd rather reminisce about the first time I saw the film with my Dad, it was summer 94, a Sunday, the night of movie thrillers, I had already discovered Hackman in "Mississippi Burning" that very year and Costner in "Field of Dreams" and "The Untouchables" and the film takes me back to a sort of TV Golden Age where the word 'thriller' meant something... I never forgot that film, it has many memorable moments (including a reference to my home country) although one can't say its director Roger Donaldson is a household name. But his "No Way Out" is one of these thrillers so tightly constructed and so effectively tense at the pivotal moments that you're more than assured to forget about its many improbabilities.
Indeed, no matter the unlikeliness of some coincidences or streaks of lucks, the film has a meticulousness of its own, a very patient way to engage us viewers by doing something as simple as making us care for the characters. And because of that we care for what happens to them, so we're much aware of the stakes for each of the three major protagonists and as an extra bonus, at the end, everything makes perfect sense.
And because Tom loved her, we can feel his shocks when he learns that he's ironically leading the investigation about her murder, and because we knew how Scott loves his boss, he would do anything to cover for him, including a 'wag the dog' story with a phantom agent named Yuri. The plot thickens when they find a damaged polaroid picture that might reveal his identity thanks to one of these pixels enhancing programs that is acceptable as a McGuffin given that the process is revealed to be long and not 100% viable. Meanwhile, other evidence consists of a gift Bruce gave Susan and that might prove his connection to the murder. Tom knows it's his picture on the polaroid so he has no other choice than incriminating Brice before he takes the blame. He asks his friend, a wheelchair-bound computer expert Sam (George Dzundza) to stall the program and so begins a race against the clock inside the most secretive place in America: the Pentagon.
The core-plot involving the three main characters is so riveting that it's almost disappointing when the film indulges to formulaic chases like when Tom tries to save Susan's friend (Iman) from Scott's goons and it's as hard to believe that a man of Scott's intelligence wouldn't already smell something fishy about Tom's selective involvement. It does seem at times, that the film takes a few gambles with credibility and gives Tom too much luck, but then again, what saves the film is the way it allowed us to follow these characters long before the murder occurs (at the forty-minute mark approximately) and so we're truly involved. It also helps that the love story, enhanced by that steamy limousine sex scene, never seems gratuitous and Susan's total abandonment to Tom makes her death even more tragic.
There's also a case being made about Tom being hardly identifiable by his witness since he looks like an average man, and that describes Costner's appeal pretty well: he's handsome in a non-spectacular way, charismatic in a quiet way, and engaging without being too flashy, definitely a low-profile hero making Tom Farrell one of his best performances along with "Dances With Wolves" and "A Perfect World". Costner has often been unfairly described as wooden but so were many actors with an incapability to strike as unlikable, like Gregory Peck, suffering such criticism when all they played were characters trying to keep straight and dignified faces because circumstances asked for it. And that's totally Farrell's situation. This is a serious picture with serious protagonists.
Hackman is also fascinating as a politician who loses control and becomes the pawn of his own subordinate played by Patton who truly delvers as a charming, clean-cut bureaucrat but so devoted to his boss that he'd turn into the devil buying anyone's soul, his evolution from a confident boyish technocrat to a Machiavellian mastermind is almost Hitchcockian but it's all in the dynamics with the corrupt Brice that he forms a sort of two-faced villain "Rope"-style with a Costner playing both the cat and the mouse's role in the thriller. That the whole investigation is embedded in the climate of Red Scare, political sex scandals and other petty rivalries, only adds to the heated claustrophobia that increases as the film moves toward its climax that, tactfully, spares us from an action scene but provides the perfect emotional momentum after such a gripping crescendo.
And yet the story has a few more tricks under its sleeve but at that point I'd rather reminisce about the first time I saw the film with my Dad, it was summer 94, a Sunday, the night of movie thrillers, I had already discovered Hackman in "Mississippi Burning" that very year and Costner in "Field of Dreams" and "The Untouchables" and the film takes me back to a sort of TV Golden Age where the word 'thriller' meant something... I never forgot that film, it has many memorable moments (including a reference to my home country) although one can't say its director Roger Donaldson is a household name. But his "No Way Out" is one of these thrillers so tightly constructed and so effectively tense at the pivotal moments that you're more than assured to forget about its many improbabilities.
Indeed, no matter the unlikeliness of some coincidences or streaks of lucks, the film has a meticulousness of its own, a very patient way to engage us viewers by doing something as simple as making us care for the characters. And because of that we care for what happens to them, so we're much aware of the stakes for each of the three major protagonists and as an extra bonus, at the end, everything makes perfect sense.