We finally get a flick starring Stallone and Schwarzenegger, and no, it’s not The Expendables. Escape Plan, directed by Swedish director Mikael Håfström brings the two former superstars together in a film that suites their selves as well as possible at this point in their careers. Although its a few decades too late.
Sylvester Stallone stars as Ray Breslin a former prosecutor who now works for his own company where he tests just how secure maximum security prisons really are. He literally does the dirty work, placing himself into these very prisons under secret guises, in order to truly test how secure the prisons are.
After just escaping one prison, Breslin and his partner receive an odd but highly profitable offer to break out of a new prison that the CIA representative deems impossible to do so. No one will know where he is, and no one will be able to contact him while he is there, which make his girlfriend Abigail (Amy Ryan) and friend/co-worker Hush (50 Cent) wary of his decision to accept. But the money and his ego are too large for him to turn this offer down, and that’s always where they get you.
Breslin thinks he will have an easy escape, but the prison that he wakes up in is the stuff nightmares are made of. You live in see-through cells that allow no privacy, your guarded by guards with masks on (so you don’t form relationships with them that brutally enforce security protocols like you wouldn’t believe. It seems like there’s no way that he will find a way out, especially with the ultra tough Warden Hobbes (Jim Caviezel) who has one of Breslin’s security books at his desk, whose goal seems to be to out do the master himself. Breslin knows that this is even out of hand, even for a professional like him, so he tries to use the “safe word” that he was given in the event that he needed to be pulled out of the job. Only Hobbes has no plan to let him out of his grasp. Clearly, there’s more going on than Breslin realized.
He befriends a fellow inmate named Emil Rottmayer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) who also takes particular interest in Breslin. They form a friendship and Breslin fills him in on his plan. Rottmayer is skeptical at first, but soon as they both get more desperate to break free, they find ways to work together in order to get out of the hellhole that they are equally as desperate to get out of.
Escape Plan is like an ode to the action adventure movies from the 80s, with plenty of cheese to spare. The acting and dialogue is pretty cringe worthy (written by Miles Chapman and Jason Keller), but what would you expect from a movie starring Stallone and Schwarzenegger in the year 2013? Sure, it does have its moments, and a few twists and turns that you will see coming, and maybe a few that you won’t. The acting is very much left on the same table of the 80s, except for Caviezel who plays a pretty good villain.
I was sinking into my chair and rolling my eyes a lot more than I was taken for the ride of what was supposed to be a mindless popcorn action thriller. Sure the plot is what it is (ridiculous) and the execution is just as insane. It entertains somewhat enough to pass time, but it doesn’t do so with style or the excitement that it ought to have. It’s a shame because putting Stallone and Schwarzenegger together should have yielded finer results, but then again look at what year it is.
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