#270: Nowhere to Run

Release Date: January 15th, 1993

Format: Streaming (Tubi)

Written by: Leslie Bohem, Joe Eszterhas, and Randy Feldman

Directed by: Robert Harmon

1.5 Stars

Journeyman director Robert Harmon’s 1993 film, Nowhere to Run, is an interesting artistic and critical failure, although not necessarily a commercial one. As much as I want to write the movie off completely, this action flick starring Jean-Claude Van Damme profited nearly $50 million at the box office. 

That’s a nice chunk of change, and it shows that Van Damme had a special appeal to fans of American action cinema at the time, despite the genre being flooded with names like Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Seagal, and Norris. Van Damme’s appeal, though, was short-lived. His career as a bankable leading man would be over within five years (the nail in the coffin would be Double Team (1997), co-starring Dennis Rodman).  

Are there signs of his impending decline in Nowhere to Run? A bit, yeah. To put it simply, the guy just can’t act. In Nowhere to Run he plays an escaped convict, Sam, who takes shelter on the sprawling property of a woman named Clydie (Rosanna Arquette), where she lives with her two young children. Clydie is being pressured by a corrupt real estate developer to sell her land, and when she and her family are threatened with physical violence one night, Sam decides to come out of hiding and defend them. After beating up the attackers, and with his cover now blown, Sam asks if he can continue to stay on the property in exchange for providing the family protection. Clydie agrees, and the movie becomes a story about these two characters who desperately need each other and eventually fall in love. 

It’s a decent story idea, but the execution is poor. Van Damme just can’t carry this type of emotional material. Sure, he can convey the emotions of a fight scene, such as pain or triumph, but watch Nowhere to Run and see him grasp for stuff like empathy or vulnerability. He just can’t do it convincingly. 

Pair Van Damme’s shortcomings with Nowhere to Run’s stock supporting characters and bizarre dialogue and you have yourself a strange, bad movie. The screenwriter, Joe Eszterhas, of Basic Instinct fame, would go on to write the infamous Showgirls the next year. Like those two films, Nowhere to Run features Eszterhas’ bluntly sexual dialogue, and that’s even if it’s a dinner scene with Sam and Clydie and the two young children discussing the size of Sam’s penis; the young daughter, who saw Sam bathing in a pond, tells her mom that it’s “big,” but Clydie, who walked in on Sam taking a shower, tells her it’s “just average.” I think Eszterhas is going for humor here, but it’s mostly just gross and inarguably strange.

It should be noted that after the film was released, Eszterhas disowned the film and blamed Van Damme for meddling with the script. He might have a point. Nowhere to Run has the trademark vanity of other Van Damme vehicles, such as self-glorification and, especially, his own gratuitous nudity (has there ever been a mainstream Hollywood actor who likes to show their ass on screen as much as JCVD?).

But I don’t buy that Van Damme is solely to blame for Nowhere to Run’s strangeness. Eszterhas’ fingerprints are all over this film, too. Either way, despite being a moderate hit at the box office, Nowhere to Run foreshadows that both men’s careers were running on borrowed time.