Name : Bill Goodykoontz / Alias : Arizona Republic
Bang, boom, bam. That's about the size of things in No Escape, a movie banking on its admittedly first-rate action drowning out its political tone-deafness.

Name : Stephen Dalton / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Dowdle delivers enough adrenalized tension to maintain his track record of profitable, populist pulp.

Name : Walter V. Addiego / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Strict plausibility isn't necessary in these movies, but you can't just throw it out the window, and "No Escape" shows why.

Name : Kevin P. Sullivan / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Even ignoring the racism-which is pretty much impossible-No Escape is a cliche-ridden, artless relic.

Name : Daniel M. Gold / Alias : New York Times
Among the most terrifying scenes is an early shot of Mr. Brosnan in the hotel bar, shouting lyrics to a Huey Lewis tune. Oh, the horror.

Name : Moira MacDonald / Alias : Seattle Times
If you've really been wanting to see endless shots of Owen Wilson running, sometimes while carrying a medium-sized child, the thriller "No Escape" might be just for you.

Name : Julia Cooper / Alias : Globe and Mail
Whatever seeds of social justice and emotional nuance No Escape may be attempting to sow are undercut by the film's melodramatic valorization of family values.

Name : Ben Sachs / Alias : Chicago Reader
Dowdle sticks closely to the family's perspective, for better and for worse; though fairly effective at conveying their terror, he fails to establish any sort of social or political context for the story.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
No Escape is an outlandish, sometimes brutally violent, exploitative, fast-paced white-knuckler featuring your classic American everyman who suddenly develops action-hero skills when his family is placed in danger.

Name : Kyle Smith / Alias : New York Post
Writer-director John Eric Dowdle makes the street action propulsive, bewildering and terrifyingly real, and things are just getting warmed up.

Name : Peter Rainer / Alias : Christian Science Monitor
No Escape is pretty trashy, but it held my attention, which is more than I can say for most of the summer fodder.

Name : Stephanie Merry / Alias : Washington Post
Every Asian character is either a ruthless murderer or anonymous collateral damage. A lot of locals have to die, the film suggests, in order for one white family to survive.

Name : James Berardinelli / Alias : ReelViews
This isn't lightweight, fanciful entertainment; it's tense, white-knuckle material.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
I won't make a case for No Escape being a good film; the first half is pretty good and the second half ranges from pretty bad to truly awful.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
This movie really moves. But a fleet of tanks couldn't help the brothers Dowdle push past the plot holes in the screwiest mix of suspense and stereotypes since Michael Bay was a pup

Name : Ignatiy Vishnevetsky / Alias : AV Club
Despite its illegible chase scenes, awkward slow-motion shots, and fumbling attempts at political commentary, No Escape manages to be intermittently interesting, thanks to an off-beat supporting turn from Pierce Brosnan.

Name : Joshua Rothkopf / Alias : Time Out
A thoroughly ugly film for an audience that doesn't care who's shooting whom.

Name : Jake Coyle / Alias : Associated Press
Taut, well-made and entirely dubious.

Name : Michael Granberry / Alias : Dallas Morning News
A nearly two-hour thrill ride that, tired cliche that it is, really does keep you on the edge of your seat.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Between the script and the superior editing by Elliot Greenberg, there's an enormous amount of tension and thrills to be found here; unfortunately, they're all in the service of a movie that's reprehensible to the core.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
In terms of pure popcorn escapism, No Escape delivers from the get-go, cutting to the chase without belabouring the character details.

Name : Peter Keough / Alias : Boston Globe
No Escape is a tense but utterly predictable exercise in Western xenophobic paranoia and guilt.

Name : Justin Chang / Alias : Variety
A technically accomplished, morally rank slab of cultural exploitation .

Name : Gary Goldstein / Alias : Los Angeles Times
Supersize your popcorn, check your logic at the door and settle in for a pretty good ride.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : New York Daily News
There's no fleeing the clunkiness in "No Escape."

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
A taut thriller about an American family touching down in an unnamed country just as a violent coup erupts, No Escape goes about its gut-churning business by playing (and preying) on our worst xenophobic tendencies.

Name : Todd McCarthy / Alias : Hollywood Reporter
Rock the Kasbah morphs into a pretty implausible feel-good movie that's nearly as maudlin as it is unconvincing.

Name : Cary Darling / Alias : Fort Worth Star-Telegram/DFW.com
Rock the Kasbah, does not rock at all - not even a little bit.

Name : Michael Phillips / Alias : Chicago Tribune
A white-savior showbiz fable of a particularly dubious and retrograde variety.

Name : Jim Slotek / Alias : Toronto Sun
It's a movie that's half-over before it tells us what it's really about.

Name : Tasha Robinson / Alias : AV Club
A comedy that's openly afraid to seem too sincere or too mawkish, and doesn't fully commit either to its comedy or its uplift. Like Murray, it's wry and presented largely in air quotes, with an accompanying eye-roll.

Name : J. R. Jones / Alias : Chicago Reader
This dismal comedy, scripted by Murray's old pal Mitch Glazer (Scrooged), evinces only enough interest in Afghanis to keep the story rolling.

Name : Richard Roeper / Alias : Chicago Sun-Times
This movie is all over the place.

Name : Natalie Daher / Alias : Minneapolis Star Tribune
It fumbles a bit by prioritizing the goofy antics of its white cast over what turns out to be a smart depiction of non-Western life.

Name : Steven Rea / Alias : Philadelphia Inquirer
Some projects are just too misguided for the star to mug and shrug his way out of. Consider Rock the Kasbah at the top, or the bottom, of that list.

Name : David Edelstein / Alias : New York Magazine/Vulture
As one-liner after one-liner misses its mark, you begin to feel sorry for Murray, who's really too old to be playing a guy who has a little daughter . and likes to get kinky with Kate Hudson as a raucous, Dolly Parton-style hooker-businesswoman.

Name : Brad Wheeler / Alias : Globe and Mail
Not Murray's best and not Levinson's either.

Name : Soren Anderson / Alias : Seattle Times
Murray, idiosyncratic as always, dominates, but his performance can't save this misconceived mess.

Name : Joe Morgenstern / Alias : Wall Street Journal
"Rock the Kasbah" is the mausoleum where comedy was buried.

Name : Ty Burr / Alias : Boston Globe
If it were any worse, they'd be screening it as evidence at The Hague.

Name : Alonso Duralde / Alias : TheWrap
Bill Murray is Bill Murray is Bill Murray in a comedy that's little more than a schtick delivery system with some third-act personal growth thrown in for good measure.

Name : Lindsey Bahr / Alias : Associated Press
The movie wants to be both glib and emotionally resonant, but it can't seem to figure out what the stakes are - even as people are getting shot.

Name : Rafer Guzman / Alias : Newsday
An ongoing war is no setting for a musical comedy, especially one this glib and inane.

Name : David Lewis / Alias : San Francisco Chronicle
Murray does his best to hold up the movie, but there's only so much he can do. Ultimately, his latest fish out of water never makes it back upstream.

Name : Michael O'Sullivan / Alias : Washington Post
Levinson never seems to know what to point his camera at, or when to cut, and Glazer never seems to know when to leave a joke alone and let the cast work.

Name : Andrew Barker / Alias : Variety
Bill Murray heads to Afghanistan in director Barry Levinson's dreadfully misguided farce.

Name : Peter Travers / Alias : Rolling Stone
Rock the Kasbah goes fierce to quietly touching and back to funny again.

Name : Stephen Whitty / Alias : Newark Star-Ledger
It needs a smarter script. It needs at least two or three perfectly engineered, joke-after-joke sequences. It needs a smart director - did you really do "Wag the Dog," Levinson? - whose idea of political satire goes beyond freshman-year sarcasm.

Name : Joe Neumaier / Alias : TIME Magazine
Its music-industry gags sit awkwardly next to war-zone jokes and cultural quips, landing all involved on a peace train to nowhere.

Name : Gary Goldstein / Alias : Los Angeles Times
An acclaimed film director, a legendary comic actor, lots of fun rock and pop songs, and a noble story at its core can't save "Rock the Kasbah" from being one hugely misguided dud.

Name : Brian Truitt / Alias : USA Today
A lot of the actor's usual mercurial charm isn't used to full effect and is actually tempered when it doesn't feel like it should be.

Name : Randy Cordova / Alias : Arizona Republic
There might be a decent movie in here somewhere, if the focus had been on the right character.

Name : Mark Jenkins / Alias : NPR
Rock the Kasbah's timing is so slack, and its screenplay so shapeless, that the movie doesn't even rise to the level of an Afghan-war Stripes. It's almost as laugh-free as the latest news from Kunduz.

Name : Leah Greenblatt / Alias : Entertainment Weekly
Your enjoyment of all this will probably depend heavily on your willingness to let the words romp and Taliban coexist for approximately two hours.

Name : Peter Howell / Alias : Toronto Star
Quite possibly [Murray's] worst movie ever.

Name : Manohla Dargis / Alias : New York Times
Cliched, enervating, insulting - it's tough to settle on a single pejorative for "Rock the Kasbah," though abysmal might do.

Name : Alan Scherstuhl / Alias : Village Voice
For every moment of desert beauty, or insight into the twilight economies that flourish in a war zone, there's a key scene that appears truncated or even missing.