Escape Plan Review: Arnold and Sly Lively in a Tomb

What do you do if you have fought the biggest adversaries (human and of other kinds) and generated the loudest explosions? Well, you can keep doing that to satisfy your established fan base, risking to end up like many action stars going straight-to-DVD. Or, you can diversify your projects to keep things interesting for others and yourself. The latter is what Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger did with Escape Plan, a movie that is more about brains than muscle.

The Rocky actor plays Ray Breslin, a very bulky, ex-lawyer that became a millionaire designing and tasting the most secure prisons in the world. Yes, you need to suspend disbelief a bit, but at least the movie acknowledges this with Arnie’s character telling Stallone’s “You don’t look that smart!”. The ex-California Governor is Rottmayer, an inmate that meets Breslin when he is thrown into a futuristic incarceration facility known as The Tomb, name that served as title of this film for a while.

To escape, both men need to outsmart an evil warden played by Jim Caviezel (The Passion of the Christ) who is able to make entertaining a stereotypical, one-note villain. Every mission that the heroes embark on is smarter and more creative than anything seen in The Expendables entries. Every exciting race against the clock is also filled with tension, specially because the movie makes you care about these two. Not just by showing them as vulnerable humans instead of action figures, but also because of the incredible chemistry between them.

Sly makes you feel the pain when you see him suffering physical and mental abuses, but it is Arnie who really shines. His character has more range and allows him to flex both his comedic and dramatic muscles. The scene in which he speaks German will impress even his toughest critics. Who doesn’t have a chance to show his undeniable talent is Sam Neill, totally wasted in a small and thin part.

The weakest parts of this entertaining action thriller come from Breslin’s team. Their office looks like a very cheap TV set, but that looks more believable than rapper 50 Cent as a computer genius. Thankfully their time on the spotlight is brief, as well as a couple of repetitive scenes on the second half.

Escape Plan isn’t a remarkable film by any stretch of the imagination, not even my favorite action flick of the year (that title goes to the other Schwarzenegger release, The Last Stand), but it effectively creates a playground for two iconic badasses to exercise ‘con man’ and ‘prison’ tropes. This break from straight explosive movies help both actors escape the notion that they belong in the past.