Atrophy and apathy:
Escape plan's again action titan tag team is too little, too late
WRITTEN BY ANDREW BONAZELLI
In 1993, an action blockbuster co-starring Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger would have dominated the box office for months. Twenty years later, when this historic beefcake summit finally occurred (no, both Expendables movies don’t count—those were just crummy cameos for the latter), Escape Plan failed to eclipse $10 million in its opening domestic weekend. What the hell happened, America?
There are a number of reasons why Escape Plan flopped—primarily, in lieu of hard-R bloodbaths like Cobra and Predator, today’s kids are content to flock to PG-13 superhero fare for their fisticuffs fix—but the film itself is a modest triumph for the obscenely plasticized Sly and disquietingly schlumpy Ah-nuld. Basically, it’s a feature-length extrapolation of that sweet prison sequence in Face/Off, where the jailbirds wore boots that locked them to the floor when they acted up. Here, Stallone is a security firm head who studies maximum security prison schematics in order to expose their weaknesses. Irony of ironies, he tests one prison too many and winds up incarcerated in a system of interconnected glass cells without explanation. He finds a sympathetic cellmate in the grizzled Schwarzenegger, and the two join forces to, you know, uncover the truth, find a way out, kick ass, yada yada yada.
Overall, even though Stallone’s tightened visage can barely squeeze out complete sentences anymore (somehow making Arnold the coherent one), this is a solid late-career bone for fanboys. You won’t appreciate it much today, but it’ll be a fun curiosity when these guys are finally retired for good.
There are a number of reasons why Escape Plan flopped—primarily, in lieu of hard-R bloodbaths like Cobra and Predator, today’s kids are content to flock to PG-13 superhero fare for their fisticuffs fix—but the film itself is a modest triumph for the obscenely plasticized Sly and disquietingly schlumpy Ah-nuld. Basically, it’s a feature-length extrapolation of that sweet prison sequence in Face/Off, where the jailbirds wore boots that locked them to the floor when they acted up. Here, Stallone is a security firm head who studies maximum security prison schematics in order to expose their weaknesses. Irony of ironies, he tests one prison too many and winds up incarcerated in a system of interconnected glass cells without explanation. He finds a sympathetic cellmate in the grizzled Schwarzenegger, and the two join forces to, you know, uncover the truth, find a way out, kick ass, yada yada yada.
Overall, even though Stallone’s tightened visage can barely squeeze out complete sentences anymore (somehow making Arnold the coherent one), this is a solid late-career bone for fanboys. You won’t appreciate it much today, but it’ll be a fun curiosity when these guys are finally retired for good.