It’s one thing to be an action or horror movie that slides silently into theaters on Oscar weekend in the hopes of appealing to a demographic that has little interest in whether “Life of Pi” will take home more trophies than “Amour.” But if you’re an art-house film getting a relatively quiet release on that same weekend, things look a little more hopeless. Not that “Inescapable” is entirely boutique cinema — despite its multi-national pedigree and the presence of an Academy Award-winning actress, the film tries to meld politically charged personal drama with the action-movie tropes you’d expect in a story set in the Middle East. (Chase through a crowded marketplace? Brawl at the hamam? Check!)

Writer-director Ruba Nadda (“Cairo Time”) never fully commits to either, unfortunately; the characters are sketchy types, while the shoot-em-up sequences fails to elevate the heart rate. The results feel like a blandly perfunctory “Taken” rip-off made for Canadian television. Adib (Alexander Siddig, “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”) lives comfortably in Toronto with his wife and two daughters. He never speaks much of his earlier life, so when his oldest child, a photojournalist, travels through Europe, she can’t resist stopping in Damascus to find out more about the past her father has fled.

Dangerous
Those secrets remain dangerous decades later; his daughter disappears, and Adib must return to his native Syria for the first time in decades to find her. Thankfully, this trip brings him in contact with the film’s only interesting character — Fatima, the woman who was set to marry Adib before he fled the country. While not necessarily better-written than anyone else in the film, Fatima is powerfully brought to life by Marisa Tomei, who finds a vast array of notes to play in a woman who could have been merely a walking embodiment of abandonment-fueled rage. As played by Tomei, however, we read a full life history in her eyes, and “Inescapable” flags noticeably whenever she’s not on screen.

Nadda’s strategy is to let us learn little by little just what happened to Adib all those years ago and why he had to escape Syria, but the character is so unengaging that by the time all has been revealed, it’s too late to care. The sketchy writing would be forgivable if the action aspects were more potent, but there’s just no intensity to be found here. We get plenty of pursuit, but the adjective “hot” couldn’t be applied to any of it.
All that’s left is a cast of skillful actors (Joshua Jackson turns up as a Canadian diplomat who’s more involved with things than he originally appears) valiantly trying to elevate a fairly generic script into something meaningful. Had there been a few more moments where Tomei was unleashed upon the proceedings, “Inescapable” might feel like less of a waste of time for viewers and creators alike.
 

In a recent interview in New York magazine, director Steven Soderbergh lambasted critics for praising movies he felt weren’t, as he sniffed, “up to snuff.” “I don’t grade on a curve,” Soderbergh said, implying that movie reviewers do. Guilty as charged. When looking at the curve for all Dwayne Johnson movies, “Snitch” belongs a little over the hump on the side of the better, more ambitious efforts. On the curve of the entire pantheon of all movies ever made, slot this action drama just to the left of the mid-point, right alongside hundreds of other recent, by-the-numbers, genre programmers. Johnson, still known to many fans as “The Rock,” his nom de WWE, plays John Matthews, a hardworking, upstanding, self-made businessman who owns a construction supplies company in Missouri. So how come Matthews is soon climbing behind the wheel of one of his company’s big rig trucks to transport drugs and drug money for a Mexican narcotics cartel and dodging bullets?

Risky
It’s all part of a risky plan to free his 18-year old son, Jason (Rafi Gavron), after the youth is set up by a friend and arrested on a drug charge by the feds. When Jason faces a mandatory sentence of at least 10 years behind bars, Matthews makes a deal with the hard-nosed federal prosecutor (Susan Sarandon). Our hero will go undercover to help her nab a drug dealing biggie in exchange for Jason’s freedom. (A title card claims that the film is “inspired by true events.” The word “inspired,” obviously, allows for a lot of wiggle room.) “Snitch” distinguishes itself from even more generic action films by using as a pivotal plot point a hot topic (the excesses of mandatory sentencing for drug arrests) and by surrounding its pro wrestler-turned-movie star with a phalanx of talented, name supporting players (Sarandon, Benjamin Bratt and Barry Pepper). Also on the plus side, “Snitch” is low on splash-happy blood, gore and bone crunching. And, mercifully, there are — this is way rarer than you’d think — no scenes gratuitously set in a strip joint.

Johnson’s acting is up to the demands made upon him here. Once famous for his ability to raise a single, quizzical eyebrow, he has since advanced to membership in the flared nostrils school of acting, using that action to convey extreme concentration or emotion. When not flaring his nasal cavities in “Snitch,” he mostly registers as stalwartly intense. What’s most refreshing about “Snitch” is that director-writer Ric Roman Waugh (“Felon”) and co-screenwriter Justin Haythe (“Revolutionary Road”) add a welcome note of complexity by depicting three of their characters as caring fathers. The trio — Wallace, an ex-con employee (Jon Bernthal, of “The Walking Dead”) who helps him, and a drug lord (Bratt) — are otherwise wildly dissimilar and yet the actions of each are clearly guided by concerns for their sons. Somewhere in there, there’s an essay for a budding film critic to write how father-son relationships elevate what seems on the surface to be a routine genre film into ... oh, never mind. (RTRS)
 

By Alonso Duralde