No Exit

Directed by Damien Power, No Exit follows several characters, including Havana Rose Liu’s Darby Thorne, Danny Ramirez’s Ash, and Dennis Haysbert’s Ed, as they find themselves trapped within a snowed-in rest stop alongside one or more vicious criminals. It’s a familiar yet workable setup that is, at the outset, employed to distressingly underwhelming and uninvolving effect by Power, as the filmmaker, working from Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari’s screenplay, delivers a distractingly low-rent endeavor that unfolds on sets that look like sets and boasts visuals of a decidedly less-than-cinematic nature – which, when coupled with a fairly generic opening stretch, doesn’t exactly inspire much confidence or draw one into the proceedings. It’s clear, then, that No Exit improves considerably once it progresses into a surprising and impressively brutal midsection, as the picture, beyond a certain point, adopts a propulsive feel that goes a long way towards compensating for (and canceling out) its assortment of far-from-enthralling attributes – with the exciting, electrifying third act ultimately ensuring that the whole thing concludes on a relatively memorable note. The end result is a decent-enough thriller that generally does an effective job of exploiting its claustrophobic premise and atmosphere, although it remains obvious that the movie’s inconsistent execution prevents it from wholeheartedly becoming the small-scale sleeper Power has obviously intended.

*** out of ****