Metacritic reviews

On its own terms, Escape From Mogadishu makes for an engrossing, nail-biting Korean history lesson.

Ryoo ramps things up impressively once all hope of protection from local forces evaporates. Audiences are treated to half an hour of top-class car chases and shootouts as the group attempt to make it safely across town and onto a rescue flight.

You want great action? Eschew the comic book movies and read a few subtitles. Escape from Mogadishu is in a league of its own this summer.

You can tell Ryoo loves Hong Kong action cinema. His camerawork is nimble and elastic, and his starchy diplomats are unexpectedly great at martial arts. But the character scenes are well-handled too, and there’s a smart critique here on a divided country that can’t even be truly unified in a shared crisis.

A rollicking masterclass in escalating tension.

A giddy chase scene almost singlehandedly rescues Escape from Mogadishu, an otherwise unmoving South Korean political thriller about the real-life Korean diplomats who fled Somalia during that country’s 1991 civil war.

This is a decent, intelligent, well-acted film if a little uninspired until that third act, which packs an almighty punch.

The picture, a big-budget spectacle guided by the sure hand of action director Seung-wan Ryu (Crying Fist), is at its most effective when the hurtling camera is strafed by bullets. It’s less successful when the headlong pace falters to allow the screenplay to hammer home its message of collaboration and tolerance.

With little interest in elucidating the conflict at hand, much less in distinguishing between the various Somali parties in play, “Escape” is a wildly inadequate history lesson — it’s a silly blockbuster after all. More offensive is the film’s eagerness to whittle one nation’s traumatic episode into a setting for confectionary escapades.