Kevin Costner’s Spy Thriller Is an Overlooked Masterpiece

Between 1985 and 1990, Kevin Costner transformed from a virtually unknown actor to being arguably the most powerful star in Hollywood following Costner’s triumphant feature directorial debut with the 1990 epic Western film Dances with Wolves, for which he won two Academy Awards. With his breakthrough role in the classic 1985 Western film Silverado and first starring role in the poignant 1985 comedy film Fandango, Costner established himself as an adventurous, exciting, unpredictable young actor who was seemingly capable of anything.

While Costner’s performance as legendary law enforcement agent Elliot Ness in the 1987 crime film The Untouchables represents Costner’s star-making role, his next film, the 1987 thriller No Way Out, which was released just over two months after The Untouchables, contains one of the most complex and interesting performances of Costner’s career.

In No Way Out, Costner plays Tom Farrell, a Navy Lieutenant Commander assigned to investigate a politically charged murder for which Tom emerges as the prime suspect. The murder victim is a woman whom he was in love with but who was also the mistress of Tom’s boss, who killed her. In a clever variation on Alfred Hitchcock’s wrongly accused protagonist, Tom finds himself being framed for a murder he didn’t commit by people unaware of his true identity, which is revealed in one of the most shocking twist endings in cinema history.

No Way Out Involves a Deadly Love Triangle

No Way Out, which is set in Washington, D.C., opens with Tom Farrell attending an inaugural ball at the invitation of his college acquaintance, Scott Pritchard, who serves as the general counsel for Secretary of Defense David Brice, played by Gene Hackman. At the ball, Tom has his first meeting with Susan Atwell, who sleeps with him later that night. Tom eventually discovers that Susan, played by Sean Young, is Brice’s mistress.

Shortly after he and Susan begin their affair, Tom, after displaying heroism aboard a ship in the Philippines, is recruited by Scott to serve as Brice’s liaison with the CIA. However, he becomes increasingly unhappy with the deceptiveness required to maintain his relationship with Susan, whom Brice regularly visits in her apartment. One night at Susan’s apartment, while Tom is with Susan, Brice unexpectedly arrives. After Susan begs Tom to leave her apartment through the back door, he angrily complies.

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Outside Susan’s apartment, Tom, disguised in darkness, looks at Brice, who is plainly visible under a streetlight. Upon entering Susan’s apartment, Brice angrily questions Susan about the presence of another lover. An enraged Brice eventually slaps Susan, who is killed after falling over an upstairs railing and crashing through a glass table.

After being contacted by a distraught Brice, Scott, played by Will Patton, removes all evidence of Brice’s presence at Susan’s apartment and hatches a plot to pin the blame for Susan’s murder on the man whom Brice glimpsed outside Susan’s apartment, still oblivious to the fact that Tom was Susan’s lover. This puts Tom, who is subsequently assigned to lead a dummy investigation into Susan’s murder by Scott, in the situation of being framed for a murder he didn’t commit but for which all the evidence nonetheless points in his direction.

Kevin Costner’s Tom Farrell Is a Guilty Hero

Most of the action in No Way Out, which is based on the 1946 novel titled The Big Clock, takes place in and around the famed Pentagon building, where space and time become increasingly constrictive for Tom Farrell, to the point where he is eventually reduced to hiding in crawlspaces to avoid pursuing assassins and military officers. While Tom and the audience know that he didn’t kill Susan and is instead being manipulated by Susan’s killer, David Brice, and Brice’s assistant, Scott, Tom is nonetheless unable to fully reveal the entirety of his knowledge about this conspiracy due to the nightmarish circumstances in which he finds himself hopelessly trapped.

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To deflect attention away from Brice’s involvement in Susan’s death, Brice and Scott constructed a false narrative in which Susan had an affair with and was subsequently killed by Yuri, a mythical Russian spy who has long been rumored to have infiltrated the American intelligence network. Since Tom was, unbeknownst to Brice and Scott, Susan’s lover, any evidence connecting Tom to Susan, especially a poorly developed photo of Susan and Tom together, also implicates him as the elusive Yuri.

Salt Took Inspiration From No Way Out

With the concept of Russian sleeper agents being embedded within the United States, No Way Out serves as a precursor to the 2010 action thriller film Salt, in which Angelina Jolie plays Evelyn Salt, a CIA operative who is accused of being a Russian sleeper agent and goes on the run to dismantle a conspiracy to assassinate the President of the United States and trigger a nuclear war.

Like Evelyn Salt, Tom Farrell displays great courage and integrity while raising serious questions regarding his true history and ideology. Like what happens to Evelyn, No Way Out ends with a fugitive contemplating an uncertain future in a world in which he seemingly has nowhere to go. No Way Out is streaming now on Tubi.