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2024 FANON WIKI AWARD NOMINEE! |
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This article is written in Hong Kong English. |
| This version has its own spelling conventions (colour, realise, travelled) and some terms that are used in it may be different or absent from other varieties of English. This should not be changed without broad consensus. |
No Escape (Cantonese: 冇逃避 Jyutping: mou5 tou4 bei6) is a 2021 English-language Hong Kong live-action/animated science fiction action comedy film co-written and directed by Wilson Yip, and starring Aaron Kwok, Norman Chui, Tom Hardy, Dayo Wong, Keanu Reeves, Daniel McCullough, Stanley Coverdale, Tom Wilkinson and Terrance McPherson. It was loosely based on the 1987 novel The Penal Colony by Richard Herley. In a dystopian future, a former Garrison Commander serves life imprisonment on a fictitous British Overseas Territory inhabited by savage and cannibalistic prisoners.
Plot[]
The flag of Staftona Island, the fictional British Overseas Territory which is the main setting of the film.
In 2035, the penal system is run by corporations, and prisoners are seen as assets. Highly-trained ex-Garrison Commander John Leung Yiu-Cheung is imprisoned for life for murdering his commanding officer after being ordered to kill innocent civilians in Sucre; having escaped from two Level 5 maximum security prisons, he is sent to a Level 6 facility. A fellow prisoner tells him about "Staftona Island", a British Overseas Territory where they send the worst prisoners and is feared more than the prison. The Warden, after being held at gunpoint by Leung, is convinced that he is a threat and exiles him to the island.
On the island, Leung is captured by a group of prisoners known as the Outsiders, led by a sociopath named Tom Hargreaves and whose only rule is the Law of the Jungle. The abandoned island resort, complete with dilapidated houses and a swimming pool, is where the Outsiders have established a base. Hargreaves forces Leung to fight one of his men for amusement and is impressed when Leung kills his opponent in seconds. He offers him a position in his gang; instead, Leung knocks Hargreaves into the pool, steals his rocket launcher, and flees the Outsiders' camp. He is pursued through the jungle and cornered at the edge of a high cliff before being shot in the neck by blowgun darts. After falling into the river below, another prisoner group called the Insiders retrieves him.
Led by a terminally-ill doctor called the Father, the Insiders established a cooperative autonomous community with laws as opposed to the tyranny of the Outsiders. Leung meets Father; Keith Edwards, the new-arrival helper; and befriends Casey Hui Tak-Ming, a naïve young man given a life sentence for a kidnapping which led to a dual felony murder accidentally when the hostages died. Leung learns that the Insiders are heavily outnumbered by the Outsiders and that he is the only person to have ever escaped from Hargreaves' camp. The weapon he stole is appropriated for the good of the community.
Cast[]
- Aaron Kwok as John Leung Yiu-Cheung (梁耀祥)
- Norman Chui as the Father
- Tom Hardy as Tom Hargreaves
- Dayo Wong as Casey Hui Tak-Ming (許德明)
- Keanu Reeves as Stephano
- Daniel McCullough as Killian
- Robert Carlyle as Keith Edwards
- Stanley Coverdale as Dysart
- Tom Wilkinson as the Warden
- Terrance McPherson as Lawson
- Dean Wright as Iceman
- Zahed Hassan as Scab
- Zhang Junhao as Skull