Escape Plan

Escape Plan is not a spinoff of The Expendables franchise, but it sure feels like it.  I don't just mean because it has aging 80s action icons in it.  It has more to do with the questionable quality while maintaining a sense of fun about it.  Even that sense of fun is dubious as the only folks who would think it's fun are people with an affinity for 80s and early 90s action films.

The film is about a man named Ray Breslin (Stallone) whose job is to escape from prisons in order to uncover the flaws in security.  Breslin is the best prison escaper money can buy.  He wrote the book on escaping prison.  No, literally.  Breslin wrote a rather sizable text on the subject of breaking out of jail.  He is approached by the CIA with the offer to test an inescapable prison. What he doesn't realize is that not only is he being tricked into being taken out of commission, but this prison was designed based on his book!  Under the watchful eye of the cruel warden, Breslin must team up with another prisoner, Emil Rottmayer (Schwarzenegger), in order to break free.

The story is dumb.  The characters are one-dimensional.  The dialogue is laughable.  So how is this even remotely a watchable movie?  Because it's made to be an old school action flick that rides on the screen presence of its leads and fun action scenes.

Escape Plan does suffer from some pacing issues.  There are a lot of times when the film drags a bit.  It does seem as if they trimmed as much as they could to speed up the movie, but Stallone and Schwarzenegger (but especially Stallone) talk so slowly that the film loses some energy.  These two men, who are as well known for their unintelligible speech as they are for their muscles, fill every patch of dialogue with long pauses and/or "intense" grumbles.  But it's worth trying to decipher their speech as the dialogue is hilariously bad at times (use subtitles if you must).

Stallone plays Stallone.  He's "the best there is."  He's a renegade.  He's hyper-masculine.  It's what I expect from Stallone and he's mastered this performance over the decades.  Schwarzenegger, however, plays his part differently than I expected.  Sure, he has some dorky one-liners as one would assume Schwarzenegger would.  But he plays his part a little off kilter.  A little nuts.  Schwarzenegger essentially was cast as Stallone's wacky sidekick, and Schwarzenegger plays it so wacky (especially next to the steroid mannequin that is Sylvester Stallone) that he steals the whole movie.  Jim Caviezel deserves some mention as the evil warden.  He revels in his evil-ness and that is not only fun to watch in a "Bond villain" kind of way, but it also helps the audience forget that all the "good guy" inmates are terrorists. 

Escape Plan is a dumb movie with some truly hideous CG effects, but I still got a kick out of it.  Despite being a dumb movie, there are some clever escape bits.  It has a fun cast including Amy Ryan, Vincent D'Onofrio, Vinnie Jones, 50 Cent, and Sam Neill.  There's a couple of knowing jabs at the dumb-ness of these kind of movies in the script which made me laugh.  All in all, Escape Plan may not go down as a classic in the action genre, but it's a good way to spend a couple hours.

6 out of 10