Directed by Roger Donaldson. Written by Robert Garland
The public won’t ever really know what counterespionage looks like inside the Pentagon, and Roger Donaldson’s No Way Out won’t change that as pace takes precedence over poise in this potboiler-ish thriller that boasts alchemic performances in silly circumstances.
Kevin Costner plays Tom Farrell, a wonderboy Lt. Commander in the navy who’s brought to Washington to work for the Secretary of Defense (Gene Hackman), a man keen on ending the military industrial complex and its reckless spending. I know, sounds boring, but you don’t have to care about that, because even Farrell doesn’t once Susan enters his life.
As Susan, Sean Young makes a break from the icy and withdrawn love interest she played in Blade Runner, and instead promises eternal life and happiness. To call it a whirlwind affair is selling it short, and the chemistry between Costner and Young is what’s special about No Way Out, because it’s so unbound and unfettered.
Romance in thrillers is often some self-important and somber affair between two people, sometimes very serious, but always sexy, but Costner and Young make it disarming and real. Together, they’re lovestruck fools grinning from ear to ear, as if the other’s existence is some heavensent blessing launching both into euphoric glee.
Unfortunately, nothing gold can stay and No Way Out must turn its attention to what it offers on the tin: spy intrigue. Farrell learns Susan’s sugar daddy is the Secretary of Defense, his boss, and things get even hairier when Farrell is tasked with leading a mole hunt that looks to involve both his boss and himself. What kind of love are you loyal to?
No Way Out gets less compelling from here on, because it becomes quite of its time. It has cliché love scenes with generic pop music playing, and the score in general is straight out of a cereal box, with bargain bin synths that honestly feel more at home in some middling sci-fi, not a thriller set in the halls of power.
Equally unsophisticated, but at least quaint, is this naïveté common to the 80s when it came to computers and what they’re capable of. One thread of Farrell’s investigation sees a computer analyze the chemicals found in a victim’s stomach (just three chemicals in there judging by the bar graph), in order suss out the victim’s recent whereabouts by matching the chemical composition in some database that logs the chemical footprint of every locale in the entire United States.
It was probably impressive then, it was probably dumb once our digital expertise caught up, but now it’s great because you sense the movie’s really trying to burnish the expertise and skills of everyone involved, doing so in a way that doesn’t rely on physicality or gunplay.
It gets no less goofy when people are involved, like when an eyewitness is shepherded around the Pentagon to look at thousands of employees on the chance he can identify a suspect in Farrell’s investigation. What’s smart is that No Way Out doesn’t slow down enough for you to really think too hard about this stuff.
Farrell’s work is a high wire act with multiple powerful people trying to knock him off balance, and there to make things worse is Will Patton as Pritchard, the secretary’s assistant, a zealot and micromanager who attaches himself to Farrell’s hip, the two becoming an obscene siamese twin figure at times. Patton usually provides a warm, but firm type of masculinity, but here he’s a lightning bolt, jagged but with every bit of energy focused on his goal.
If movies can pull off this hopscotch-from-hell routine, they’ll never be boring. Carl Franklin’s Out of Time is another example of a not-great movie that nonetheless keeps you invested as a central character must jump through flaming hoops on a pogo stick to stay just one step ahead. We don’t give enough credit when writers manage to fit the ridiculous pieces together.
Its frantic circus performance lets you see past how silly No Way Out is, because it’s far from the serious spy intrigue it pretends to be, but rather a heady, cliché-filled and swashbuckling romp that taps into Cold War attitudes (and a bit of regrettable homophobia) but lets you have fun because Costner, Young, writer Garland, and director Donaldson definitely are.
Mikkel Frederiksen 