Escape Through Africa

Eric Roberts studied acting in Britain in the early 1970s. Therefore he must have relished the challenge of doing an English accent in Escape Through Africa.

Roberts has a starring role in this movie. An old fashioned rip roaring adventure in the mould of Zulu.

Unfortunately it is let down by a clunky script and a very low budget.

Set in 1914 East Africa. British army officer Captain Lockwood (Eric Roberts.) His niece Anne Corringfield (Linn Bjornland) with the help of African tribesman need to warn a neighboring outpost of an impending German attack.

However Lockwood suspects that there is traitor in the party. Anne then goes off to rescue a local girl who has been abducted.

The story is too cliched. It lacks action and it needed a lot of extras for some scenes to even make it look like a viable epic.

Roberts seem to be enjoying himself with a meaty character. A racist of his time, we regards the Africans beneath him, not bothered that a local girl has gone missing. Yet his character begins to understand the local natives.

Clearly jobbing actors have to earn money some how. That can be the only reason this film exists.

Please don't waste your time watching this. I do really wonder how any film like this can be worth making. Who is paying to watch this??

The current IMDB score of 4.1 is a fairly accurate assessment of this movie (but I feel it should be lower). Seeing Eric Roberts as the lead actor should have been my first clue that this movie would bomb, but I thought I'd give it a go regardless. Although it became immediately apparent that this movie was a B-Grade movie, it did start out okay. It didn't take long to slowly get worse until it reached the level of stupid. Poor script, poor acting, terrible fight scenes, cliche story line and what can only be described as major plot holes scattered throughout. It got an extra star only because of Linn Bjornland and her cuteness :P.

The story line had great potential to become a movie classic and the location is great. There is great scenery. But this "epic" falls flat. The acting is wooden, the music is occasionally just too much and although the captain character could have been memorable, Eric Roberts is just plain awful. His lines are flat and he is stiff and slow; never has been that great an actor. The best acting, by far, is by the "natives". Especially the child who is better that all the others. The battle scenes between the natives are pretty well done. The script is very much "so so". Anne is unrealistically naive.

First I'll say that this is an "adventure" movie in which action scenes are important, but here there's a sore lack of experience producing such scenes, which come out like soft, slow, unrehearsed fights- so this movie is doomed from the start. Add Eric Roberts' feeble attempt at a British accent and you have no hope of getting through it without fast-forwarding. The story itself is thin (and possibly objectionable in its portrayal of the local warriors), but I could see it working with the right cast and director.