Escape Plan stars Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. They were born 24 days apart in 1947. This makes them 67-year-old action stars. I am a 66-year-old writer. You tell me who is in the right job.
EP is a story about prison escape. SS plays a brilliant guy who gets thrown into “escape proof” prisons and then breaks out to demonstrate the holes in the system for his freelance employer. In fact he has written the textbook on the subject.
After an opening sequence in which he shows how tough and smart he is, he agrees to go into the best-ever, number one, absolutely, positively and completely escape-proof prison.
There he encounters AS, who is really big and tough, but can’t figure a way out. Since the inmates don’t appear to be capable of getting out of the back seat of a two-door car, it’s puzzling why the state would go to all this trouble to keep them locked up. Just put them in the backseats of two-door cars at an auto junkyard, and that should do it. Except for SS. He would get out.
Once in the “joint,” SS promises to help AS escape. But they have other problems. The welcoming cart dropping off their cell goodie pack has inadvertently left out Grecian Formula, Metamucil, Depends and Poligrip. They don’t have TV, so no Dragnet, Adam-12, and Mary Tyler Moore reruns – all known to be prison inmate favorites.
The prison food sucks, the toilets are cold stainless steel and there is no bingo. The only fun is supplied by the warden, played by Jim Caviezel, and a crew of guards wearing robot-like costumes. The fun consists of getting beaten up and tazered.
Things move right along with betrayals, and plot twists and turns galore, plus plenty of bright lights. Actor Sam Neill plays the sympathetic Doc, whose job causes him to struggle with his conscience, all the while stitching up wounds and handing out aspirin.
It turns out that the prison is in a very unusual location. Also surprising is that EP turns out to be reasonably entertaining. It just goes to show you can’t keep a retirement age action star down. Except during naptime. Rated 2.9 out of 4.0 Alcatrazes.
