Escape Plan

Arnold Schwarzenegger must be living a good life. Look at how he has aged, fantastically. He is a fit guy, he was Governor (of a now failing state), and now he has all this free time for chilling, making movies, and spending loads of cash.

Because of that, I have decided to talk about Escape Plan from the point of view of Arnold, not the actual main guy in the movie. That’s right. Fuck the police.

I am mostly doing this because I love his beard in this movie.

Rottmayer (Arnold Schwarzenegger) is current locked up in a beyond illegal prison somewhere in the world. He really doesn’t know. But the prison is not your standard prison. They live in glass boxes, and they are suspended along stair cases, not in a normal rows and columns. There are a plethora of armed guards, who all wear masks so that they are not identifiable. Their isolation rooms are tiny boxes with bright hot lights, not dark rooms like the normal. No, just a little bit in that room will teach you to fuck around again.

But then, this Porthos (Sylvester Stallone) character comes waltzing into his prison. He notices him instantly, always looking at the guards, inspecting shit. Rottmayer considers himself a favor guy, so he offers to help Porthos out, see why he is being weird. According to Porthos, he gets paid to get put into prisons, look for weaknesses, and break out of them. But something is wrong this time, all of his normal criteria is off, things have changed, his evacuation code isn’t working. Someone has set him up to fail and get locked away for ever.

Looks like these two masterminds, one a criminal, the other not, have to work together to beat the system. But can they really trust each other?

Jim Caviezal plays the warden, and you may remember him as Jesus from The Passion of the Christ. Amy Ryan, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson, and Vincent D’Onofrio play members of Stallone’s team (member, tech guy, accountant, respectively), Sam Neill plays another doctor, Vinnie Jones is head of security, and Faran Tahir as another prisoner.

Note the bar code on their shirts. They…really didn’t explain any of that.

Wait, 50 Cent?! Yesss, another movie where I have him in it. This one was purely an accident! Note to self, review more 50 Cent movies. He should be the highest tagged actor on this site, damn it.

Sorry, I keep getting distracted by the actors in this movie.

Well, strangely enough, I had fun with this movie. It wasn’t meant as a comedy, but having Stallone/Schwarzenegger in a situation where we have to assume they are smart comes with a few laughs. Especially when they both deliver their normally cheesy lines. The difference between the two is that in this film, Stallone says it all with a serious face, like he is the BAMFest BAMF, while Arnold is willing to grin more with his character and enjoy the moment.

I am saying Arnold was the better of this two in the film. His distraction scene in German in the film is almost worth it for the chaos it produced alone.

In terms of twists, some of them are obvious, and I think the film even makes fun of how obvious they are, but not everything is obvious. This is more of a thriller action movie, with most of the violence comes near the end when they actually attempt their escape. Accidentally hilarious moments like sudden waves of armed guards, more than should be at the prison, getting mowed down with a machine gun make this movie worked.

I am not sure if I really liked this movie, or if I just liked it more than Carrie and The Fifth Estate, which also came out this weekend. Even if that is the case, fuck it, it was more enjoyable than Stallone’s recent work.