YMMV / No Escape (1994)

• Anti-Climax Boss: While Outsider leader Marek gets a relatively memorable (although not too long) final battle, the same can't be said for his Badass Army of Always Chaotic Evil marauders, especially after the more intense and drawn-out Christmas raid in the middle of the film. They charge into an empty camp and mill around in confusion for a few seconds before Robbins blows almost all of them up with a grenade launcher without a fight.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Some of the secondary members of the Insiders are strikingly popular.
  • Dysart, for being a dry Gadgeteer Genius who turns out to be The Atoner for his past as a bomb maker.
  • Stephano, the crossbow-carrying, cowboy-hat wearing head scavenger who keeps trying to buy Robbins’ boots.
• Complete Monster: Walter Marek is the cultured, yet savage, leader of the Outsiders on the prison island. Keeping them savage and devoted to violence and cannibalism, Marek also forces others into gladiator fights for amusement, and to keep a brutal system going. When he is humiliated before his men, he promptly kills one who questions him and heads to massacre the more peaceful Insiders. After being repelled, he later forces two of the heroes to fight to the death, before attempting to slaughter the Insiders once again.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: The Insider society looks grimmer than the ending tries to imply, as they just had to blow up all of the buildings it took them years to build. Their doctor and inventor are dead. Their new leader Hawkins is a good man, but the Father earlier expressed reservations about his ability to lead the group. And even if Robbins and the other escapees do manage to create a public outcry and get Absalom shut down, the facility Hawkins and the others will be sent back to is still a Hellhole Prison.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • As pointed out by 1000 Misspent Hours, the film's depiction of the prison-industrial complex is both depressingly accurate to and in some ways less dystopian than in the actual 2022.
  • As an eerie coincidence, 2022 was the very year that Ray Liotta would die.
• Third Act Stupidity/ Villain Ball: The Warden has been successfully keeping an island full of prisoners secret and playing them against each other for years. It's only when there is a large explosion in the more peaceful prisoners' camp that he decides to directly intervene, leading a small riot squad on a helicopter personally without even waiting a few extra minutes for additional squads to get ready and then landing where he and his helicopter can be captured and left to the mercies of the more violent prisoners. It's ambiguous on what he was trying to accomplish with this. One helicopter squad is not going to restore order on an already chaotic island, and there's nothing that he could do in person that he couldn't have left to an expendable and trusted mook. Was he trying to silence specific witnesses? Eliminate evidence that only he knows about? Rescue his Mole? Who knows.
  • At least part of it is implied to be the Warden’s vendetta with Robbins clouding his better judgment. Considering he has an Oh, Crap! look when he learns that Robbins survived his encounter with Marek and has been taken in by the Insiders, he was hoping to have him suffer at Marek’s hands for defying him in front of the prisoners.

---