Escape Plan

There was a point where Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone were the two biggest action heroes in Hollywood. Before The Expendables franchise, audiences would have gone crazy to see them kick ass together in a film. 10 years ago Escape Plan would have been quite the summer blockbuster, but unfortunately it’s an action movie with very little action.

Ray Breslin (Stallone) has made a career breaking out of prisons and has written the go-to book on prison security. So far there hasn’t been a prison cell that can hold him, that is, until he arrives at a top-secret, off the books, prison designed to make people disappear. Now it’s no longer a job but a fight for survival as Ray is locked away with some of the most dangerous criminals in the world.

Escape Plan is essentially an unsuccessful attempt at turning Prison Break into a film. The problems stem mostly from the fact that what is supposedly an impenetrable prison fortress actually has some of the most lackluster rules in place. Sure, the glass cells and masked guards look cool (and are actually quite practical) but the fact that nobody ever gets searched or that all the inmates are allowed to mingle at once is a bit ridiculous. While this might be considered nitpicking for some, they are quite important details to consider when the entire films hinges on the prison being impossible to break out of.

While under lockdown, Ray teams up with inmate Emil Rottmayer (Schwarzenegger) to escape. There’s some drama at first, but Schwarzenegger and Stallone do make a decent team. It’s a shame that the plot is so weak that it doesn’t really matter. Dialogue consists of cheesy one-liners, mostly from the mouth of of Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson’s technology wizard Hush, and lackluster action sequences that reaffirm our action stars of the past don’t quite have the same bravado they used to. Even the film’s main villain, Warden Hobbs (Jim Caviezel), boils down to a generic bad guy with an accent.

Escape Plan feels like just an excuse to get Schwarzenegger and Stallone together in a film that isn’t The Expendables. It relies on style instead of substance and still manages to be dull. It’s an action-less action film with little incentive to watch.