You know what? I kind of needed this.
I’ve written before about the dispiriting nature of the movies I’ve seen this year, and as such, I’ve increasingly turned to smaller, stranger films in order to maintain any kind of enthusiasm. (Which is important, because I kind of write about movies now.) This was fine for a while. But after a few months, I really started to miss the comforts of a well-executed genre piece.
Things like a conventional three act structure. Corny one liners. Crunchy guitars. Hammy character actors. And, if I’m being honest, I’d gone far too long without watching shit blow up.
Gravity was an awe- inspiring and exhilarating return to the world of mainstream entertainment, but I don’t know that I would call it “fun”. Escape Plan is very, very fun.
It’s not the balls-out action movie I would have expected from the long awaited team up of Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger (without having a Statham-shaped albatross slowing them down.) Really, it’s far more of a thriller. And that in itself is part of its charm. If it wasn’t obvious from the title, Escape Plan is a jailbreak movie, which happens to be one of my favorite types of thrillers. At their best, they’re a smarter version of the prototypical action movie. It’s fun to see somebody think through a situation, to plan, strategize, improvise instead of just shoot their problems to death. When it’s well done, it can be just as exciting as watching Tony Jaa kick someone so hard their teeth invert.
The plot, if it needs going into, is that Stallone plays a professional jail-breaker-out-of-er who is hired to make sure a secret CIA detainment facility is escape-proof. (SPOILER ALERT: It is, but not until the third act.)
Look, this is not a movie you go to in search of surprises or an in-depth examination of the human condition. (Which you should well know because at this point in his existence, Sylvester Stallone barely resembles an actual human being.) The measure of this movie’s success will be found in the deftness of the plotting and the charisma of its heroes, and on this score, Escape Plan is a rousing success.
While it might seem like a stretch to think of Stallone as the kind of engineering genius he plays here, he does a fine job. This isn’t a flashy role, and Stallone knows it. It’s a surprisingly understated performance, which enables him to pass as the professional he’s made out to be.
Stallone is aided by a weirdly eclectic supporting cast. Amy Ryan is here, possibly because she forgot that she’s an Oscar nominee. She’s given almost nothing to do, which is probably par for the course in a movie like this, but is disappointing none the less. Less disappointing is the limited role of Curtis ’50 Cent’ Jackson, playing an ex-con computer hacker and showing up just long enough for all of us who listened to Get Rich Or Die Trying to say to ourselves “Wait, what?” Sam Neill has a small role as a doctor dealing with a different kind of dinosaur (I’m allowed one ‘Stallone is old joke’ per review, and damned if I’m not going to cash it in); and Vincent D’Onofrio twitches most entertainingly as Stallone’s business partner, who is exactly as trustworthy as a character played by Vincent D’Onofrio can be expected to be.
Oh, yeah. I forgot that Vinnie Jones is in this movie. You probably will, too.
But, of course, everyone takes a backseat to the star attraction, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
While Stallone has maintained visibility by cannily trading on the all-consuming nostalgia that’s choking our culture, Arnold has mostly been offscreen for the past decade. And not counting his CGI cameo in that Terminator movie we’ve already forgotten about and his embarrassingly jokey cameos in the Expendables movies, his only credit has been the massively underrated The Last Stand, which (by necessity) spent a fair amount of time sanctifying Arnold as a still-viable action movie presence. But it’s different here.
By taking a supporting role here, he is freed of the pressure of being the action hero, or having to comment on his advanced age. Schwarzenegger is allowed to have fun here, and it might be his best performance ever. (I wonder if that’s the compliment I mean it to be….?)
Stallone and Schwarzenegger have expert chemistry here, and the rapport between them papers over some of the flaws of the movie, such as the lack of a truly hissable villain (as the coldhearted, hilariously prissy evil warden, Jim Caviezel is great, but not given enough to do; neither is Vinnie Jones, as his head of security.)
But, surprisingly enough, the story holds its own. The pacing is excellent, and there’s little in the way of subplots or needless melodrama to slow the momentum. The first two acts effectively play out the suspense and danger of escaping a seemingly impossible situation, and when the movie finally turns into a straight up action movie in the final thirty minutes, it feels earned. Even if the action isn’t the greatest in the world (director Mikael Hafstrom is great at suspense; less so when the guns come out), it’s still cathartic to see these guys doing what they do best.
In the end, the best comparison I can think of is 2008’s The Forbidden Kingdom. We all dreamed of a movie where Jet Li and Jackie Chan teamed up, but the reality was never going to match up to the one we imagined inside our heads. Similarly, I think we all wanted a specific version of a Stallone/Schwarzenegger crossover, and this probably isn’t it.
But I think it’s a way more interesting movie than the one we would have expected, and probably a better one, to boot.
