If you've been reading my reviews, you've might have noticed that I'm somewhat of an Arnold Schwarzenegger fan. However, I was never big on his Escape Plan co-star and buddy, Sylvester Stallone. When I heard of their collaboration in Escape Plan (they've been planning a collaboration since the 1980s), I was somewhere in between of wanting to and not wanting to watch it. Nonetheless, the concept of the movie seemed interesting enough for me to actually go see it after all. I didn't expect much from it, but in the end I was pleasantly surprised and thoroughly entertained.
Ray Breslin (Sylvester Stallone) is a professional escape artist – he escapes from prisons for money, in order to test their security. One day he gets an offer from the CIA to break from the world's most secured, illegal, off the books prison that holds some of the most dangerous prisoners in the world. He accepts the offer but is betrayed – he finds out this is not a job but someone payed to have him kept in there forever. Upon entering prison he meets Rottmayer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) whom he befriends and with whom he tries to break free.
Escape Plan is a rather entertaining movie. A stupid, silly, confusingly acted, overblown movie – but still an entertaining movie. While the concept of escaping from an inescapable prison is always interesting, Stallone and Schwarzenegger take it to a new level. Escape Plan, in spite of looking serious from time to time, is still a generic action movie that doesn't take itself seriously and has a lot of self-deprecating humor (including one scene in which Arnold yells gibberish and prays in German). All the bad things in this movie have a certain trashy/it's-so-bad-it's-good quality. Especially the villains in the movie, who are fun and over the top – Jim Caviezel, whose character looks like he came out of a comic book, is great as the butterfly-collecting (the man collects butterflies!), possibly homosexual, ruthless warden Hobbes, and Vinnie Jones is exaggerated as always as the guard Drake. The two leads – Schwarzenegger and Stallone – are on auto-pilot mode throughout the movie, just doing what they mastered through the years, and what they are loved for – being bad asses. The only one that stands out in the movie for being just terrible is Curtis Jackson, aka 50 cent. I don't know why he's in the movie but one thing is for sure – he's unwatchably terrible, in a bad way.
Actually, I don't know why 50 cent's character, Hush, was even in the movie, nor do I see the importance of Amy Ryan's character Abigail. These two weren't crucial to the plot, and it would have been much better if the majority of their screen time was cut out so the plot doesn't wander off from the prison setting. This could have improved the movie's pace and mystery even more. Speaking of prisons, while I do think that the scenes inside the prisons were decent, I don't think that Escape Plan exploited the potential of a setting inside an unbreakable prison enough. In the end, the whole prison setting seemed – in lack of a better word – not particularly developed (the nature of the prison, the inmates, the guards, etc.). All in all, like I said before, Escape Plan is a silly, fun, dumb, cheesy popcorn flick that, what it lacks in intelligence, it makes up for in its entertainment value.
Rating: 6/10 Read more at http://passpopcorn.com/
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