The forgotten Kevin Costner movie that Roger Ebert said was ingenious: “A superior example of the genre”
Kevin Costner’s career has been about as tumultuous as any Hollywood movie star. As soon as he became a box office draw for being a certain brand of all-American leading man, he started developing, financing, and directing movies as well, leading to a cycle of successes and failures that even Francis Ford Coppola might wince at.
First, there was 1990’s Dances with Wolves, an extravagant passion project that served as the actor’s directorial debut and which many in Hollywood thought would be a disaster. Instead, it was a box office and critical smash that earned both the ‘Best Director’ and ‘Best Picture’ Oscars. Costner ruined all that goodwill in 1997 when he made The Postman, a three-hour, $80million western that earned terrible reviews and $30m at the box office.
Since then, his career has been pretty uneven. After all the wild success of Yellowstone, he turned around and made Horizon: An American Saga, a film with, admittedly, a few extremely passionate supporters that nonetheless became a box office flop and a personal financial disaster for its star.
Long before Costner became an intermittent Hollywood mogul, however, he was simply Kevin Costner: Movie Star. He was the guy who played the government agent in The Untouchables, the American Everyman in Field of Dreams, and, shortly after Dances with Wolves, the conspiracy theorist who just couldn’t let go of the JFK assassination.
During this period of his career, Costner starred in a film that was an unexpected success with an influential viewer. When Roger Ebert saw the 1987 erotic thriller No Way Out, he was an instant fan. It stars Costner as a Navy officer who is assigned a job in the Pentagon by the Secretary of Defense, played by Gene Hackman. Costner begins an affair with a woman who turns out to be the Secretary’s mistress (Sean Young), and when she turns up dead, he becomes the primary suspect.
It could easily have been a boilerplate thriller full of plot holes and melodrama, but instead, it avoided the usual pitfalls of the genre to become an unexpected critical hit. It didn’t make much of an impact at the box office, earning only $36m, but Ebert raved about it.
He called it “truly labyrinthine and ingenious”, explaining that its strength was that, despite its complicated plot, the characters were so carefully crafted and well-acted that he cared more about the people in the story than the mechanics of the plot. “Movies such as this are very hard to make,” he wrote. “For proof, look at the wreckage of dozens of unsuccessful thrillers every year. No Way Out is a superior example of the genre.”
The great Gene Hackman never put a foot wrong, of course, which makes Costner’s performance all the more impressive. Ebert noted that he found the star much more complex and interesting in this movie than he had in No Way Out. As an innocent man wrongfully accused of a crime who has reasons that he can’t reveal the true killer, Costner is forced to give a nuanced performance, and he does so with surprising skill given the stock characters that he usually played.
