Escape

In the opening scene of Howard J Ford’s latest film, we see a young woman wearing tiny denim shorts and a pink bikini top running through a desert. This is par for the course for a certain sort of film, except that it’s her abdomen, not her breasts, in centre frame, the straps beneath her top showing off impressively toned muscle. Ford’s films often focus on women’s bodies, but as sources of power, not just passive objects. In this case, however, his heroines are also being trafficked, and they don’t seem fully aware of their power, cowed in a way that doesn’t ring true so that despite efforts to subvert the narrative the film too often feels like just familiar exploitation stuff.

It has many of the signifiers thereof. One of the bad guys is distinguished by an eyepatch, another by a scar. They all have East European accents. The women, selected at the behest of a fussy client whom we never meet, are all slim and blond with the same kind of bland Hollywood features which, frankly, make it difficult to keep track of who’s who. They seem unable to do anything without squealing in an unconvincing porn star way, which escalates to a crescendo when they are trying to escape; even when trying to hide, they whimper loudly.

Older women are allowed more personality, with Never Let Go’s Angela Dixon amongst their number – these are the mothers back home, worried because their kids haven’t contacted them, gradually arranging an investigation. One waits for this to go somewhere (and hopefully for Dixon to bring her own fighting talents into action), but it’s only there as filler and perhaps, to suggest that young women shouldn’t really be going anywhere unchaperoned.

Ford is a strong action director and spare plots often serve that best, but here the action is really the film’s only redeeming quality. Some of the dialogue is atrocious and the performances are, well, let’s say variable. A couple of really talentless young women drag the others down. This does allow for a few amusing moments, however. With her life on the line, one of them pauses to recount a backstory which one truly expects to end with her explaining that that’s how she learned that there was no Father Christmas. Meanwhile, the bad guys repeatedly explain their plan in case anyone has forgotten, and the only even slightly ambiguous character, a guy whom they have hired to flirt with possible targets and find out about them, turns out to have a tragic secret and redemptive arc which creates as many structural problems as it resolves.

There are possibilities here. The bad guys are looking for a particular body type, which leads them to kidnap a dancer – not smart if you want people who are physically easy to control. They also kidnap a nurse – somebody whose training makes her highly organised and good at focusing in a crisis. There is some development around these things, but it falls well short of its potential. A subplot around domestic violence plays out like soap opera stuff, with none of the gravitas it really needs. The misogynistic rhetoric spouted throughout is gratuitous and quite tedious; we already know what kind of people we’re dealing with. The climactic revenge scene has the unfortunate effect of suggesting that there are more shocking and meaningful things out there than the loss of some of the women’s lives, whilst really not being very remarkable at all.

The action delivers a few thrills but this time the rest falls short of the mark.