Recent Entries

The rest is mostly chase scenes as Adib tries to dance his way past agents from several secret services, who spend as much time warring with each other as they do trying to corner him. Inescapable is Nadda's first foray into thriller territory, and her inexperience shows in awkwardly mounted fight scenes and clumsy car chases, not to mention an almost fatally explanatory script.

Nadda is very good, though, at juxtaposing Damascus' tranquil beauty with the terrors of everyday life in a police state. You'd never guess the movie was shot (beautifully, by Canadian cinematographer Luc Montpellier) in South Africa; we feel in our bones the beauty and danger of a lovely Middle Eastern city blighted by the presence of heavily armed soldiers on every corner.

There is, too, an ambiguity to the characters that slyly complicates an otherwise pro forma plot. Adib is far from the only slippery customer in a growing ensemble, among them a suave Canadian embassy official (a very good Joshua Jackson), a Russian relic from the old days (Danny Keogh) who can still pull strings on demand, and Adib's former friend Sayyid (Israeli actor Oded Fehr), now a ranking intelligence chief who seems less than delighted to see his old buddy resurface.

As the Biblical moral parable it clearly means to be, though, Inescapable is a stew of muddled thinking. Must we like Adib better because he, too, was once betrayed? Should we be as jazzed as he is that his skills as a former professional bully prove crucial to his quest?

Siddig's soulfully expressive performance aside, Adib himself is written as a frustratingly thin character who gives little sign of inner torment or of coming to grips with the deep stains on his integrity. Adib's search for his child is framed as a journey of expiation that will wipe his slate clean. As atonement goes, aren't we talking apples and oranges?