In Escape Plan, Sylvester Stallone's expert prison-designer finds himself mysteriously thrown into a prison which he himself designed to be escape-proof. Quite the ironic dilemma. Can he find a way out to defeat the institution's nefarious warden of the prison (played by Jim Caviezel)? If so, he'll prpbably need the help of some of thhe inmates. Perhaps luck is on his side when one of them turns out to be the (possibly) equally smart Emil Rottmayer, played by another action mainstay Arnold Schwarzenegger. Will the two men help each other defeat a common enemy... or kill each other first?
I had the good fortune of attending a screening of Escape Plan (formerly called The Tomb) in the middle of the San Diego Comic-Con. Breaking 'in' was an arduous matter… I knew from the Facebook page that there was going to be a screening and marked it down on my “To Do” list while I was there. So... I got to the Convention Center and zipped straight to the Summit booth... who told me that they would be giving away tickets to the screening the next day BUT that they hadn’t figured out how or how many yet and so to stop by tomorrow. On the way out I ran into a guy dressed like one of the masked Escape Plan security guards, silently handing out flyers about the screening. He was obviously instructed not to talk, but I managed to get out of the guy that I would just need to go to the theatre at the given time and they would let me in. Simple as that, right? I went to bed that night, not worrying about it too much. The next day, bright and early, I ran to the Summit booth again - just in case that information was awry - and the guy there this time didn’t know ANYTHING about tickets and said to just go to the theatre. Cool, right? So I went down to the theatre and there was a HUGE line stretching around the building. As the hours passed, the line stretched out considerably longer. As the time got near, some of the orderlies of the theatre were combing back through the line asking to see people’s tickets. Quite a big “WTF?” moment... as not only did I do everything humanly possible to get a ticket but every level of their staff had proven to be utterly inept. However, in the end I DID get in and I got to “meet” Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone on the red carpet, so I probably shouldn’t complain...
It’s hard to talk about the movie without it being colored by the whole spectacle of the premiere party and actually having Arnold and Stallone introducing the movie just two rows ahead of me, exchanging jokes and jabs. Stallone himself even concluding things by threatening to kick our asses if we don’t like the movie (and Schwarzenegger leaving the room with a “I’ll be back!”). However...I will try.
The movie, at its heart, seems to want to play with a lot of stereotypes and tropes. We have Schwarzenegger, Stallone and (in what amounts to almost a walk-on role) 50 Cent basically playing geniuses… what’s going on here? At one point both Arnie and Sly remark to each other across a table, “You don’t look that smart” and “Neither do you,” echoing what the audience has been thinking all along. What we have here is a movie by a director with a script that has the utmost appreciation for the strengths of Arnie and Sly. You put either of the guys in a movie with a director who gets their strengths, both can produce gold. Take Arnie in True Lies, or Stallone in Copland and compare that to, oh... I don’t know, Arnie in Collateral Damage or Stallone in Bullet to the Head. See what I mean?
While this is a 'prison-breakout movie', action fans will not be disappointed. It’s a hard-R experience and isn’t afraid to embrace the rating whenever possible. In one spot Arnie gets a gatling gun, physically ripping it out of a chopper (big, big crowd pleasing moment) before turning it on the bad guys. Stallone gets his moments, too. The whole thing is what you’d get if you were to take Christopher Lambert’s Fortress and make it into a buddy movie. Like Fortress (both Fortress movies, actually), a big running question throughout the movie is “Where is the prison located?” For a while I thought they were literally going to take a page from Fortress and have it be in the desert or in outer space, but the answer is actually pretty unique and clever. The masked guards are pretty fearsome… and the big Vinnie Jones showdown was just about as epic as you’d expect. I also liked the scene where Arnie/Sly give nicknames to all the guards.
And so to their 'nemesis'. He’s a warden named Hobbes played by Person of Interest's Jim Caviezel. He's a pretty insidious guy who doesn’t seem to have a lot of redeeming qualities and who - not one to like being played - becomes hip to what Arnie and Sly are cooking up early on and even goes so far as to try and turn one against the other. While he does deliver in the villainy department, I would actually go out on a limb and claim he’s the weaker spot in the movie. He’s a bit TOO evil for evil’s sake, with no background as to why he is the way he is ever provided to any extent. Maybe that’s intentional… the less you know about the bad guy, the more mysterious and villainous they can be... but I still say he could have been developed a bit more.
There’s lots of twists and turns, one liners, machismo, and basically everything fans of Arnie and Sly would be expecting. It’s all actually a lot more of a high concept film than I’m used to seeing either guy involved in, at least in some time. In many ways it’s the kind of movie we all wanted to see in the mid-1990s, less so now, but it’s still great to see. It almost feel as if the Expendables films – which I don’t really enjoy and find impossible to even view them as films at all – stole the fire out from under what could have been an even bigger spectacle: the first on-screen pairing of Arnie with Sly. Either way, it pays off in the ways you’d expect – they meet, they don’t like each other, they fight, they develop a friendship, and then we get to the teaming up, pooling of resources to deal with their common problem and nemesis. And even then, there’s surprises, a couple of which made me kind of slap my head and go, “Aw, I should have seen that coming!” but at least one big one that did not. One cool moment is that this is the first time we’ve ever seen Arnie speak German in a film. It’s an effective moment in a tense scene... and to funny result.
Ultimately, it’s tons of fun, fairly clever and I came out of it thoroughly entertained. I didn’t realise it at the time, but I’ve seen two other films of director Mikael Hafstrom – Derailed and The Rite. Derailed had been wildly entertaining as the movie kept escalating and hitting us with twist after twist. The Rite managed to still get a pretty chilling performance out of Anthony Hopkins. So going from a suspense movie to a horror movie to a machismo-driven actioner definitely displays some significant directorial range...
