After all these years, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger finally team up and co-star in a film.
Yes, they shared screen time in the first two Expendables movies, but the first one featured not all that much more than a minute or so of them sharing screen time while the second featured a more extended cameo from Mr. Schwarzenegger -and a whole host of other 1980’s action stars!- but a cameo nonetheless.
Was the team up worth the wait?
Sorta.
Escape Plan involves Ray Breslin (Sylvester Stallone), whose profession can only exist in the fantasy world of movies: He’s hired to break out of jails to test their integrity. Right off the bat, you have to swallow this little bit of craziness. Let’s face it, you don’t hire someone to check out your prison’s security after spending many millions of dollars building the damn place, right? You hire the guy/gal to check the security before you commit all those millions of dollars and…
…it’s just a movie…it’s just a movie…
Anyway, that quibble aside, Breslin is hired to check out a CIA backed fortress/prison that houses prisoners meant to never be released. Breslin is betrayed and realizes that the warden of this prison, Hobbes (Jim Caviezel, essentially playing a bad guy version of his John Reese character from Person of Interest) has it in for him and is determined to keep him locked up. Thus Breslin, with the help of fellow inmate Rottmayer (Arnold Schwarzenegger), must find a way out…or be imprisoned forever.
I find it interesting how many “prison escape” films Mr. Stallone has appeared in through his career. Just off the top of my head I can think of at least three of them, from 1981’s Victory (Allied POWs escape from their Nazi captors via Soccer) to 1989’s Lockup (Stallone is locked up (duh!) and must deal with a sadistic new warden just as he’s about to be freed) to 1989’s Tango and Cash (Stallone and Kurt Russell team up as a pair of salt and pepper cops who are framed and sent to jail, where they escape). And that’s not including films with tangential prisoner related themes such as the Rambo films.
How does Escape Plan measure with the others? Frankly, of the three I mentioned (excluding the Rambo films), Tango and Cash probably remains my favorite, if only because of how balls-to-the-wall crazy it is. Having said that, of Mr. Stallone’s more recent action films, Escape Plan winds up being a pleasant enough time killer that is far more coherent than some of his other works, even if it isn’t quite as exhilarating.