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??

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.

Quality was the scene of the story. The story of how the world wars affected the territories & provinces of the world powers is undertold story. It could be argued that these territories/provinces were what the wars were all about. So i like the idea of the story but everything else about this movie screams sharknado & "films" of that ilk. The only reason i finished the movie is i paid my satellite provider $3.99 for it. So bad.

This movie tries to capture the spirit of classic movies like Beau Geste but fails to do so with a very unfocused script that had me pulling my hair out at times because the characters where just so unbelievably unreal in their roles. And this is due to a bad script with poor execution.

The story focuses on the start of WW1 & how the Germans & British had conscripted the locals into their war efforts. If this was the movie's focus, then it would have been a novel idea. But instead the movie's plot is about Germany's invasion plans of Africa somehow falling into the hands of the British. Eric Roberts plays the Captain in charge who must get the plans delivered to the next outpost so as to warn them of the Nazis plan of attack. He is accompanied by his niece & the remaining survivors. Can they make it & warn of the impending Nazi attack?

Because this script was so unfocused, the characters were flipping in their character roles going from scene to scene. One minute they are smart & intelligent & then they are just plain stupid in the next & switch back & forth again. An example is that there is a Nazi spy & several instances the spy does something that clearly reveals himself but the captain just ignores it. When it is finally revealed, the captain states that he knew all along who the spy was???

And the dialogue in parts was bad soap opera bad that I actually felt sorry for the actors having to do it. So many things in this movie didn't make sense. It was a wasted effort, just barely watchable that I didn't really care in the end who made it or not. Watch if you have nothing better to do as there is no real big payoff here.