Escape From The Outland blends hostage drama with uneven anti-war message

Escape From The Outland (M18)

132 minutes, opens on Jan 8 ★★★☆☆

The story: In a fictitious African nation torn by civil war, Chinese journalist Ma Xiao (Xiao Yang) and telecom engineer Miao Feng (Zheng Kai) travel to a danger zone so Miao Feng can repair a cell tower. They are captured by rebels. At a separate ambush, they also capture Ma Xiao’s physician wife Wenjia (Qi Xi), a member of a medical mission. While Chinese embassy staff conduct ransom negotiations and a possible rescue, the hostages are under daily threat of torture, execution or maiming.

Interesting in some places but frustratingly shallow in others, Escape From The Outland takes a new spin on the concept of the hostage drama, too long the domain of storytellers who frame them as action or espionage thrillers.

In slick productions like South Korea’s The Point Men (2023), the focus is on the investigative procedural, followed by the bullet storm that marks the rescue.

There are some pyrotechnics here, mainly at its climax. But that slice-of-action cinema comes after a first and middle section that puts Ma Xiao’s ordeal in the spotlight, illustrating the story’s anti-war message. As more than one character puts it, “in war, the real winners are the flies – they get the corpses”.

According to Escape From The Outland’s producers, the film is inspired by eyewitness accounts of Chinese nationals kidnapped in war-torn regions.

Director and co-writer Shen Ao (Dead To Rights, 2025; No More Bets, 2023) presents Ma Xiao as a news videographer who views the suffering around him only as content. After all, he is a foreigner who can easily fly home.

Post-kidnapping, he gets an awakening because he sees up close the indiscriminate effects of landmines, and the way villagers are crushed between the warlords and government forces.

Hong Kong star Simon Yam has a supporting role as a cynical weapons merchant. His character exposes the moral contrast between the virtuous Chinese, in Africa to do good, and Chinese profiteers. The film makes clear which side it supports through scenes so didactic, they induce second-hand embarrassment.

By its middle section, the movie settles down into a prison survival story, well illustrated with horrific scenes of executions, torture and maiming, appropriate for a movie about wartime inhumanity.

Strong performances from Yam, Xiao Yang and Qi Xi add depth and underscore the pacifist message, which the film nevertheless contradicts frequently through spectacular action sequences showing bad guys receiving gory retribution.

Hot take: Although marred by unsubtle preachiness about China’s mission to build roads and cell towers in Africa, it offers a fast-paced, unflinching look at the horrors awaiting civilians and foreigners held for ransom by warlords.