As my list of films has been running down, I’ve been lowering standards and adding less significant works. No Way Out is frequently cited as one of Sean Young’s most memorable performances and was very well reviewed in its time. It turns out that I must have watched this long ago as I have a very clear memory of the scene with computer processing the image but it was good to rewatch it anyway as I certainly did not understand the twist at the end at that time.

Tom Farrell is an officer in the US Navy whose college friend Scott Pritchard is the personal assistant of US Secretary of Defense David Brice. After he makes a name for himself as a hero after saving a sailor from being thrown overboard at sea, Brice has him transferred to the Pentagon as a liaison to the intelligence services. Meanwhile Farrell becomes romantically involved with Susan Atwell who he meets at a party. She admits that she is the mistress of an important married man in Washington D.C. and it is obvious to the audience that it is Brice himself. When Brice gets jealous after he discovers that Atwell has been away with another man, he kills her in a fit of rage. Pritchard convinces Brice to cover it up and blame it on the other man by claiming that he is the suspected Russian spy code-named Yuri. A manhunt is organized and Farrell finds himself in charge of trying to catch himself.

This is at its heart a thriller so it’s more than a bit odd that it only really gets going during its second half. The first half is devoted solely to setting things up, in particular with establishing how much Farrell and Atwell are in love with one another, making it feel like a romantic film, only to have her inevitably die. Still when it does get going, the sense of the net inexorably drawing close around Farrell is pretty great even if it’s not quite realistic how they try to add some action to the film in the form of a chase scene. His mounting desperation as he runs through his network of contacts to delay the investigation as he tries to find a way out even while the hunt turns into a door to door search make for some tense moments. I also like that this goes on while Brice is trying to fend off the efforts of a senator and the CIA to hold on to a submarine project that he is trying to kill, adding a bit of Washington intrigue to the mix. It would have been cooler however if Farrell had more actively used the CIA to stymie Brice and Pritchard.

One oddity in the film is how strangely loyal Pritchard is and how he goads Brice towards covering up the crime when Brice himself is more inclined towards just confessing. Plus I didn’t see the twist ending coming but it’s perfectly apropos to its 1980s setting. Overall I see this as a solid film, perhaps one of the best in the year of its release, but it’s not anything that particularly stands out as the decades pass.