Matcollis
This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.
Laikals
The greatest movie ever made..!
SpuffyWeb
Sadly Over-hyped
Afouotos
Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.
Michael Ledo
In a planned escape, Sam (Jean-Claude Van Damme) makes it on down the road. Unfortunately the prison guard knows how to use a scope and his partner in crime (Anthony Starke) dies. Sam makes his way to the widow Anderson (Rosanna Arquette) farm who is being foreclosed upon by the evil banker to make room for a development. Sam helps her out.This is the Rosanna Arquette in her prime and is about two table dances away from paying off her farm and that of her neighbor. The film had about as half as many stuntmen as actors, for the short amount of time they were needed. Our protagonist is a gentleman criminal. This movie appears to be the inspiration for the chick flick "Labor Day." Guide: No F-words. Sex and nudity (Rosanna Arquette)
rndhyd
Not exactly the typical Van Damn (SIC; ha ha) movie. Only watched it in 1-2015, although it's 20 years old.Good story/plot, moving, & somewhat to the "heart." Although, kinda slow, but has some action, & some of his fighting skills. Slightly similar to his movie in LA, which had its bayous (swamps) -- made within a few years of this -- as a drifter, helping someone.Hopefully, I gave any potential viewers an insight to watch or not.I like to brief & to the point, but the above is not submittable, because it too brief. This paragraph makes it so. No need to type blah blah....
BA_Harrison
Jean Claude Van Damme is well known for his physical prowess, doing the splits while knocking the crap out of countless thugs, but in Nowhere to Run the Belgian martial arts star tries stretching his acting muscles as well, playing mysterious loner Sam, a man with a troubled past who helps out widowed mother Clydie (Rosanna Arquette) when ruthless property developers set their sights on her land.Despite an admirable attempt at acting from the 'muscles from Brussels', I have to consider Nowhere To Run a disappointment, lacking the excitement I expect from the star, the action scenes playing second fiddle to the rather dreary drama. Towards the end of the film, things liven up a bit with a decent chase scene and a brutal final battle, but getting there is a real chore: I don't know about you, but I go to see a Van Damme movie to watch him kick ass for an hour or two, not shift bales of hay for a lonely widow and play father to her obnoxious kids (one of whom is played by Kieran Culkin, brother of über-brat Macaulay).If you do decide to stay the distance, be prepared for some gratuitous Van Damme naked ass shots (although to be fair, both sexes are catered for with Arquette revealing her mighty fine bod during a shower scene and a sex scene), Culkin launching a cringe-worthy 'Home Alone' attack on one of the bad guys (whacking him over the head and luring him into the stable to be kicked by a helpful horse), and a quite frankly bizarre moment when Clydie discusses the size of Sam's penis with her young daughter.
Comeuppance Reviews
Clydie (Arquette) is an attractive widow trying to raise her two kids, Mookie (Culkin) and Bree (Tiffany Taubman) on their family farm. Sam (Van Damme) is a mysterious prison escapee living on their land in a tent. Over time, Sam endears himself to the family, especially because the young Mookie is desperately searching for a father figure after the death of his own dad. Sam couldn't have come along at a better time, because classic evil land baron Franklin Hale (Ackland) wants to take Clydie's land and build a multi-million dollar development. So naturally he sends out his goons of various stripes to muscle the farm away. But not on Sam's watch. Will Sam join Clydie's fam? Or will yet another megalomaniacal land developer develop a way to keep them apart?Ah yes, let's take a trip down memory lane...it wasn't so long ago that every Van Damme (and even Seagal movie, as hard as that is to believe now) went to the movie theater. JCVD had yet to become synonymous with DTV, and this film is quite mainstream. It has a highly polished, theater-ready look and feel. But because, after all, it's still a Van Damme action movie, it's still dumb and Van Damme has a ton of silly one liners that really don't even make any sense. Really, he just seems confused. In just about every scene, whether he be peeping into Rosanna Arquette's window as she takes a bath, cooks a steak in the rural wilderness while wearing a suit, or just chillin' in his pup tent with the latest issue of Top Heavy magazine, Van Damme seems oddly off-kilter in his performance. But that doesn't stop him from showing his (presumably male) audience his time-honored unnecessary and un-asked for nudity. Rather than yet another eyeball-rolling shot of his naked butt, what this movie really needed was more goons for him to fight, more action scenes, and just more fight scenes in general. This is Van Damme here, after all.Nowhere To Run also needed more verve and a streamlined plot. And what goons there are happen to be not evil enough. They should have done something REALLY evil and then Sam could go after them on a no-holds-barred revenge mission. That would have been awesome. Unfortunately however, this is run-of-the-mill Van Damme with few surprises. (Although what surprises remain are pretty good). The plot of the mysterious stranger that comes to a ranch to protect a family from the no-good-niks in town is ground well-covered since the days of the earliest Westerns, and Van Damme playing Monopoly with 2 kids and a song by Damn Yankees tacked on the soundtrack doesn't really add much new to the old formula. One more thing: Without any spoiler, let us just say this: the ending is UNBELIEVABLY lame. It's one of the lamest - if not THE lamest ending to an action movie we've ever seen. The movie itself isn't nearly good enough to justify or counterbalance such a disappointing ending. It's not like "whoa, that movie was awesome, so, okay, we forgive how much the ending sucks." No. The ending just sucks, period. It drags the whole movie - everything we've just seen and invested in - down.Nowhere To Run is standard (actually, probably below-standard) Van Damme fare and despite a few bright spots, it's really nothing to get too excited about.